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Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

Man, all this effort when all most of us want is to see tweets from the people we follow in chronological order. Absolutely wild.

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This actually made me stop Facebook. I so often saw something interesting, and was never able to find it back later. It's so incredibly frustrating. You leave the site in one state, you come back and there is not relation between what you left and what you find.

Thanks for breaking my habit I guess.

Aka the reason I stopped using facebook. I don't want you select who you think are my best friends, I don't want you to randomly sprinkle in group posts, I don't want to be reminded of random events from years in the past, I don't want notifications that a random friend I've not spoken to in years has posted a picture, I don't want you to exclude some friends from the list based on gut feeling.

I just want a chronological list of all of my friends updates.

I use lists for that. I also get no promoted tweets or anything like that. Just chronological order tweets and retweets by the people that are in it.

That's a good idea actually. If I get bored on Mastodon and feel like I wanna give Twitter another whirl I'll try that. I went opened it up a few days back and saw a promoted post for every ~8 real tweets or so. Unreal.

How is Mastodon? Does it rival Twitter in terms of usefulness?

I like it, I happened upon a good collection of accounts to follow by chance and it worked out well. I really only switched because the company that made the Twitter client I used (Tapbots) made a Mastodon client (Ivory) shortly after Elon yanked API access for most third party clients. My acct is in my bio if you wanna take a look, it’s pretty chill but def less busy than Twitter

RIP third party clients.

This is what people say but revealed preferences say otherwise.

You can already do this right now

Wouldn’t this be unusable? Just a huge flood of tweets that you have no hope of keeping on top of?

Check out Mastodons federated feed, it’s a mess but fun place.

This is what Twitter used to be - I would log in, scroll down until I had seen all updates since I last checked and then left the app. This was, however, before you got tweets in your feed from people you don’t follow (outside of retweets)

is that so different from the current system? Besides, its highly dependant on how many people you follow, and whether you care about seeing every tweet from every single one of them

Only if you follow way too many accounts.

You could/can get this with Twitter lists, and it's actually way better than anything else.

That's why you only follow specific people, and there's also a couple of tools left to tweak the timeline further (e.g. very useful: disable retweets from specific 'noisy' peeps).

If you follow thousands of people then maybe. But in that case you're going to miss tweets anyway, so if you've got way too many tweets buffered and you want to see more recent stuff you can opt to skip them.

Works just fine on Mastodon for me - I've got the people who I follow and I see all their posts in chronolgical order. There's also the federated which flows past swiftly and is quite fun to dip a net into when something interesting drifts past.

Wow, you must be young. This is how the internet used to be, and people liked it.

Is that the point?

Then again if that is indeed the point, just follow fewer accounts.

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