There’s something about the method that Friendica uses to generate timelines that I find really compelling, and that doesn’t seem to be talked about much.
Friendica’s timelines are “post” centred, with replies appearing as a tree attached to that post, in a similar way to Facebook. It’s distinct from the more Twitter like method common on most of the #microfedi platforms, in which there is no real difference between a post and a reply.
The reason that I find this framework so compelling is that it means you always have context and full conversations in view. If someone you follow replies to someone else you follow, the whole post and all of the replies appear in your timeline again, with full context at a glance.
Similarly, when you’re reading your timeline, everything is grouped together. Everyone in your timeline that replied to a post is there on that post with full context. And if you’re not interested, it’s trivial to just scroll past.
Compare this to Mastodon, Misskey etc and their forks, where you tend to only see one branch of a conversation, and often have the same conversation showing up in your timeline multiple times depending on who is involved.
It’s an option for interacting with timelines that I’d love to see implemented in other FediVerse platforms!
@ada Just something as simple as the little
Link to sourcebutton(?) on each post that Friendica has would be quite welcome in any of the other interfaces. But maybe one that links to the full thread or at least shows the original post.@eshep What I really crave is for it all to be available without having to click on anything, without relying on the back button or popups.
I mean, those features would be nice too, but I don’t think they’d reshape the timeline browsing experience in quite the same way