What do you think of a timeline that insert new posts on bottom instead of on top? 👀 #Mastoot
not a BAD one! especially not in the sense that you should shut down this sort of thinking! frankly, I think you are way ahead of the rest of us. if you want to know my thoughts, they are below, but please do not interpret them as advocacy for where I think you should go, here. one of my biggest pet peeves of all times is when people shut down genuinely original ideas for no reason but their originality under the delusion they're being constructive. in fact, in the tech press, Mastodon has been a worse victim of this dynamic I have ever seen.
on the subject of re-thinking timelines, in general, though, let's consider the State of the Timeline in the general discourse:
the abstract, itself, is (still...) overwhelmingly formulated by the default Twitter timeline experience and the general hullabaloo/distrust created by Twitter, Inc.'s decade-long legacy of screwing around with its behavior on the actual live service in real time.
put another way: the VERY most basic assumed behavior from a timeline view is all over the place. I continue to be astounded by how powerful of an obstacle this is in general conversations about the social web with basically everyone after my generation. I've been working on accepting that I'm going to be fighting this battle for a very long time lol
sorry that took so much but here's the actual argument.....
if we're going to consider those users/potential users for whom the initial expectation of a strictly-reverse-chronological feed is either entirely foreign or long-since-defeated, one might argue that any sort of departure from it (even in the form of like... non-default view options in a settings menu) has an especially potent potential at this moment to become yet another Catalyst of Confusion between new users and an essential trust of this """""platform"""".
one could also argue PRECISELY THE OPPOSITE for exactly the same reasons: if only a very small percentage of new Mastodon users give a single shit about the chronological feed, maybe now more than any other time is appropriate for an attempt to rethink the whole thing.
as for Me and My House (and certainly the Social Web Consultancy business I've been thinking about trying of late, if it goes,) the chronological feed will be evangelized if for no other reason than to freeze that whole area of consideration to keep me from getting overwhelmed.
idk if that's useful or original - if it isn't, please do put it out of your mind as a developer. at this point, considering just how many reliable, high-value, diverse interpretations of the Mastodon experience are available on iOS, I would argue that you are free to prioritize your originality, and even that you should.
(this is definitely a platform-dependent freedom, btw. in general, there are just way WAY too many apps for iOS and the level of duplication has long since surpassed dangerously high.)
((here we arrive at my actual fairy wishes from all iOS developers: PLEASE close Xcode for just 5 minutes and take a look at the Windows store.... read one "Best [Whatever] for Windows 2022" and do not allow your gaze to be averted. and then tell me... just how little time do you think you'd have to expend making virtually anything of use for Windows with economic potential vs iOS.))
no, I probably wouldn't care, either, but I'm starting to wonder if anyone considers it anymore...