One of the things that the recent addition of the Feeds feature highlighted was how many cross-posts / duplicate posts there are. When you display posts from [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc all the cross-posts make it get repetitive, really fast. The same thing happens on the home feed too although it’s a bit less obvious because there’s a wider range of subjects involved.
Except now, it doesn’t, because PieFed de-duplicates your feed! And your home page, and your topics. Attached to this post is a screenshot showing how it works out - an article posted to 7 different places is only shown once despite me having joined most of those communities.
We’re still figuring out whether it’s a good idea to merge all the comments from all the cross-posts into one page and how to do that in a way that respects the different culture/rules in the communities that the posts were made in. It’s a tricky UX and social question.
I’ve held off on adding a cross-post function to PieFed until now but it’ll be added soon.
A welcome side-effect of this work is that going to another page of posts will maintain your place in the stream so you won’t occasionally see one or two posts from the previous page at the top of your new page.
Oh wow, that is a welcome side-effect: almost as news-worthy as the main feature!
This month’s dev update post is going to be a doozy.
Oh is that what the result_id in the URL is for?
I think I might’ve spotted an unintended side-effect, actually not sure if that was there already but it grabbed my attention now:
On the first page of my feed, when I select the menu of a post to go block the community that this post is in, the page changes into that community with the mention above that it’s hidden now, and when I page-back I return to my feed with that post not visible anymore.
Now on the second and later pages, if I do the same, and then do a page-back, the post is not hidden anymore. Refreshing doesn’t hide it either, I have to redo my scrolling from page 1 onwards if I wanted those communities that I just blocked to be hidden.