Newsraft

Optimal Mastodon Tools

I believe understanding this technical setup is best assisted by understanding how I see the design of the Mastodon network. Those ideas are covered in a previous post

I Don’t Like Mastodon’s River; Introducing Newsraft

Since Mastodon federates micro-blog posts from across the universe of collaborating nodes, I think the ideal interface for subscribed-to Mastodon content is a big “inbox” that’s created when some code pulls your messages from all those nodes to your computer. Then, the code should help you swiftly tear through your unread content: mark important, mark read, mark all read, peek at an image, etc.

I think it should look something like this:

The explore menu in Newsraft is like a federated inbox of all followed content. My unread posts are yellow on blue, read content reverts to a standard high-contrast play gray on black, and important posts (for further review) are marked purple. All of these colors are configurable as is the view and the date format.

The explore menu in Newsraft is like a federated inbox of all followed content. My unread posts are yellow on blue, read content reverts to a standard high-contrast play gray on black, and important posts (for further review) are marked purple. All of these colors are configurable as is the view and the date format.

The “infinite scroll” interface of Facebook or Twitter was designed to keep punters suckers users insecure so that they came back often like a cocaine-addicted lab rat tapping a button for another pellet. Despite the cognitive and productivity flaws this design brings about, those sites' ubiquity has coached many to believe “this is what social networking as to feel like,” and Mastodon has emulated it, warts and all.

But this interface fails to show off what can be so glorious about Mastodon: you can get done with “doing social networking” on Mastodon without fear of missing out. Content lands in a bucket and you can peruse it or mark it read or important on your schedule. The software that lets me have such a calm, cool experience is Newsraft.