randompenguin

@leanderlindahl

Another thing i struggle with is – it seems you dont get notified when someone interacts with your posts (likes, replies). You find out by accident or not at all.

Did you ever change this setting?

@leanderlindahl "Compact Conversation View" was explained to me as only displaying comments that are:

• a direct reply by the author to their own post
• a direct reply by the reader to a post[/i]

My proposal won't even show those. It hides all replies in feeds. Mine also makes the post body into a clickable link to the single post display page (which shows all the replies regardless of either setting).

I retracted my PR for this. It won't be in the next release of Friendica. It conflicts with the existing "Compact Conversation View" feature which hides all other comments except your own interactions with a post author (or something like that), where mine literally hides ALL comments under the post and requires you to click the post to read it on a separate page that shows all the comments.

There were questions of whether there is demand for a feature to make Friendica feeds work the same way as Bluesky and Mastodon? And whether being able to write a comment to a post in the feed, but _not_ see it get added under the post in the feed is too confusing, and whether commenting in the feed should be completely disabled, or on submission should it take you to that post's single page where you _can_ see your comment? Which will take a little more work to figure out to make it do that.

So I'll probably do a post/poll on that question and if there's enough interest I'll resubmit the PR for the _next_ version. We can probably put both options in a dropdown so you can't enable both of them at the same time.

@vegos_f06 There isn't any setting for default dimensions but server admins can set the file upload size limit, that will be what determines how large an image you can try to upload (if it's extremely large the server might still time out before it finishes uploading). Server admins can also change how Friendica stores uploaded images. The default is to store them in the database, but that can quickly make the database grow, so there are other options. However, none of this is in the hands of the user.

You can also place external images in your posts, assuming the site you're pulling them from allows hotlinking. Friendica will try to generate a local preview image for it (though I've personally found this very hit-or-miss).

The masonry layout works with images that have different aspect ratios. The aspect ratios and the order you put them in your post have more to do with the layout than anything else. If they're all the same size and aspect ratio they'll likely layout in a grid naturally.

As for the actual "grid" layout in Friendica, we're still trying to determine if it every actually gets used. It's only used if Friendica can't get the image dimensions, but it's unclear if/when that ever happens.

@vegos_f06 I'm working on addressing this for the next release. There are some strange conditions that will prevent it Friendica from showing a gallery that I have not figured out how to address:
1. Do not put ANY text *after* your photos.
2. Do not put any text *between* your photos.
3. Do not put any line-breaks/carriage returns between your photos.

It pretty much has to be an uninterrupted set of photos with no spaces or anything between them. Or it will break the gallery layout. It happens so often for people that I'm also doing a workaround to sort-of gallery the images anyway, even Friendica won't put it in a gallery.

I'm also working on making the post preview show you your images as a gallery too. Right now it only shows them full-width one after the other. So you have no way of knowing if you've done something to "break" the gallery layout or not until you've already posted it.

Here's the GitHub thread about it:
github.com/friendica/friendica…

I'm still trying to get my PR together for this. I'm also adding functional ALT tags to images and previews in the post composer.

While trying this out I've decided I'm going to submit a PR that offers "Hide Comments in Feeds" as Settings > Display option for ALL themes (turned off by default of course).

People who want a really compact feed will love it. People who don't like extra clicks will hate it. But nobody has to use it if they don't want to.

In every feed all of the comments are hidden. But you click on the post body and it opens the post in its own page, only there it will actually show you any comments under it.

This is exactly how the web UI of both Mastodon and Bluesky work so it is a UX with which many users will already be familiar.

The trick is making sure that all the other stuff in the post still works as expected. The contact links in the post header. The (re)action buttons below. Commenting without having to first open the post in the single display page.

The only thing I don't like is that it literally just hides the comments in the feeds. It's still going through all those loops creating them. But the same loop creates the top post too and while the templates are context-aware if they're being rendered in a "display" page or not, the backend is not. So it's not quite as efficient as it could be. Maybe I'll figure out that backend part. But right now on my Dev Server I've got this working perfectly across all the themes.

Now, if I can just get all these PRs I've been working on submitted...

Curious whether people would want this theme style to work like Bluesky/Mastodon where:
* The main feeds only show you the actual posts and none of the comments
* You click the post body to open that post in a new window by itself with all its comments

It would require adding a couple invisible elements to a Vier template to pull it off, but I don't know if people like the way Bluesky and Mastodon make you go to a new page to see the comments or if Friendica users would want that?

@fossfan FYI, Bookface has a Wiki: gitlab.com/randompenguin/bookf…

There is also a new release of Bookface today: gitlab.com/randompenguin/bookf…

This is for 2026.05, 2026.01, and 2025.7-rc. It doesn't work with older versions of Friendica. And there is no Bookface for 2026.08-dev yet.

Okay everyone I get it. DON'T CROP IMAGES. The "Literal Grid" is out. Not doing it.

This is why I ASKED first. 😉

@hypolite The masonry layout doesn't display like the second version because of this conditional at the top of the layout function:

if ($singleImageInRow = count($PostMediaImages) == 1) {
     $PostMediaImages[] = $PostMediaImages[0];
}

The array of images is run through both array_map and a "chunk" operation to split it into pairs. If the length of the chunk is "1" it duplicates the one image and lower down in the code gets the dimensions as if there were a duplicate of that image next to it. But the total count for display is still the original count of images so it never actually displays that image twice at the end.

Comment out/remove that conditional and the last image is scaled to span the columns above it.

@heluecht So then you don't care for the "Literal Grid" layout that crops them?

And in case it isn't clear, in the "masonry" layout with 3 images the dimensions of the third image aren't being changed, only the scale, to match the width and span the columns above it.

@tealk Then this theme style wouldn't be for you. Like I said, this takes design cues from Bluesky and Mastodon which both have left and right sidebars. It's a key aspect of the layout, as is the narrower feed.

Thankfully Frio allows you to use other themes/styles/schemes. If this were one of the Big Tech platforms they'd redesign and you'd just have to live with it.