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!
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@ada I have moved full time to Friendica. The Mastodon->Friendica migration path won’t pull your followers with you, but IME they pretty much all came anyway. The UI needs a bit of love and it can have a learning curve compared to Mastodon, but it’s a much more complete experience and I’m really liking it.
It’s dreadful for quickly sharing photos and I really wish they’d make that process less convoluted, but I’m sure that will come.
And if you want, you can still get the Mastodon experience by using the Mastodon client or Elk with it.
@ada indeed. i moved from mastodon to friendica partly because of the timeline.
That’s the main feature, i use friendica. I had a Twitter-Account for years… never used, because i always missed the context… That’s why i used facebook before the fediverse… because i need context and space to make short or even very long ansers… in one posting. That’s also, why i use friendica… looooooong answers… and images inside the text.
@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
@ada #Epcyon claims to have this, I’ll prolly be finding out in the next month or so. I think #akkoma might too, that or #calkey
@taur10@venera.social @ada@embers.social Calckey doesn’t. Calckey has a beautiful interface and threading, but it’s not post/reply centred in the same way Friendica is.
@ada @ada Gotcha. With all the forks there are, it’s hard to keep track of what they add, and then there’s all the little pieces like #Epcyon and #micropub