Local timeline

Converting threaded posts to blog proposal

A version of this post was originally published at shom.dev

Based on my incessant posts it's clear that I'm a fan of littleFedi and the static blog integration. Currently, it is possible to take an existing public post and mark it as a blog post and takes that existing post and all the interaction on it and creates a blog post from it (with the interactions as comments), brilliant.

Desired State

The idea is that if you end up writing a series of posts and it becomes something that is more meaty and has some value for longevity it can be persisted by simply changing the post type to a blog, after the fact.

This is what I wrote when I first learned about this feature and the more I think about it the more it makes sense for me. The whole premise was that you start writing something and have interactions with others or have updates over time and now it is a "body of work". How can that be made into a full-on blog post without the venerable copy-paste method. And again, from that original post

it's cognitively easier to write a series of posts instead of sitting down to write a blog post.

Proposal

A threaded post is a known quantity in the Fedi world and littleFedi does a great job of showing threads. So when editing a post the threaded replies that are either nested replies OR replies to the top post from the original author can be considered for inclusion into the blog post. Making an assumption on which posts should be part of the blog is not possible since the author did not write the posts originally with intent for a blog post. This is a potential way this can be achieved but I can imagine how the implementation can be hairy and supported scenarios could be difficult to define and explain. Here's a visual to illustrate the idea, I created this with the littleFedi UI and developer tools in Firefox.

Hey @stefano following up from my earlier comment with some quick edits from the DOM inspector. These are some UI/UX suggestions and why I'm making the suggestion. I hope this isn't over stepping and happy to take guidance on what kind of feedback you'd prefer instead.

Changes shown and why:

• The default width increased from 720 to 800 to prevent overflow of Catch-up into separate line and 800 is a reasonable expectation for width for contemporary viewports.
• Both of the screenshots show #littleFedi interface with timeline-nav moved above composer.
  • When a new user comes to the home timeline they don't see all the awesome post options, wonderful as they are, they are numerous and intimidating.
  • However, when they click into updating the status the options are revealed to them. This follows existing paradigm of clicking Poll / Content Warning / Schedule / Self Destruct which reveal relevant options when clicked.

In writing this up I also discovered a quirk with the Visual Editor, there's no mechanism to make a nested bulleted list. I switched to markdown to indent the list level and it works fine when doing that, it also handles traversing up the bullet hierarchy via backspacing as expected from other editors.

Happy to expand on anything I explained poorly! Also, you/team have been putting in some Herculean efforts with the updates, I hope there are scheduled naps 💛

Cheers!