Yeah, I understand that everything can’t be loaded at the sam time, but this is not the solution. The reason to browse by chronological order, from oldest to newest, is so that I don’t miss posts. But on everey single microblogging app, decentralized or ran by a lunatic wit too much money, there is the barrier between the last few new posts, and where you last left reading.
The eorst part: this loads the newest first, and prefers to push you to the top, requiring you to search where you actually left off.
How about we just have a button to “go to the newest” that throws you to whatever has been published within the 5 minutes, and assume if you’re browsing from bottom to top, you want more to be shown, but properly chronologically.
I’ve never been a fan of these either. They’re some sort of in between cop out between proper pagination and endless scrolling.
Like choose one and be done with it.
I feel these ecmxist precisely because endless scrolling doesn’t. These load more, but I’m not sure the apps ever unload, so for the optiomization I understand why they have implemented this as they have BUT for me that way is just an excuse to be lazy with garbage cleaning. And these also might be one of the biggest reasons why the trending stuff doesn’t stick on Mastodon; Mastodon users don’t sort by popular, and while scrolling by chronological order, these things create obstacles for seeing all things posted.
I don’t think it has anything to do with laziness. Endless scrolling has been around for a long time and is really easy to implement.
They do this for one reason - because on average, this method costs less in data served to the average user than something like endless scrolling. They serve up the most popular comments to you thinking that is what the majority will want. Then they put a button to load more because only a small percentage actually use it, and that saves them money.
They don’t load the comments in order because they don’t want you to click the button, so making the results of the button inconvenient will detract more people from using it. It’s all about trying to subtly convince you to trust that the comments that they served up originally are the only important ones so that you don’t even bother to click the see more link. Enshitification at its finest.
As a UX designer, the first part is part of the reason. Companies actually “want” you to continue to scroll and to click the view more button. Every time you view more, they get more ad revenue and more data.
Endless scrolling is an accessibility and data conservation nightmare. It’s also arguably grey UX, as it encourages scrolling addiction. Having the user have to make a decision to load more saves the user data, and keeps the page from shifting context without user input. Global apps should consider the needs of the bulk of the world, which is still on pay-for-data plans.
The answer tends to be to also implement server-side sort and filtering that includes “show new.”
I’m not sure I understand.
You mean when you scrolled down, say, the newest 50 posts, then you have to click a load more button for the next 50 to load?
I’m scrolling UP. That’s the thing, I don’t scroll down, because the newest post are always on top, and I continue scrolling from where I stopped. So I scroll up, and when tou press that horrendous exuse of a button, it loads more posts, and prefers to set the scrolling position to the post above. To my knowledge there is no option to display “oldest first”.
Oooh, sorry, I completely misunderstood. Yeah I agree, that’s indeed terrible UX. And sadly super common.
I hate this.
Fedilab has two buttons in the “load more” thingy. One to load the contents above the fold (so you an keep scrolling up) and one to load the buttons below, so you can keep scrolling down. It works remarkably well.
I’m pretty sure this is hell to program, as most prebuilt list views will use a Y position measured from the top of content. This makes it hard to insert content in the center if you’re trying to scroll up, as you may not know the exact height of the content you’re loading to compensate for the change in position.
However, Fedilab solved it, so other applications can solve it too!
Thanks. I downloaded fedilabs, and so far like what I see.
This is usually the app failing to fetch remote posts in your timeline, on Fedilab you can set the app to do it for you
It’s never been too much of an annoyance for me, but that’s because I am already used to it. I think that the app needs to do it by itself without needing user intervention.
I’m…mixed on situations like these
Like yeah, it’s very annoying having to manually refresh for more content, but at the same time I do appreciate having more time to fully explore my timeline instead of coming back from a post to see they completely discarded my reading place, losing whatever is was looking at, likely forever.
Of course, for quieter networks you may run into the problem of content refreshing too little…
To be fair, I don’t mind the button itself, if it worked as I wanted it to, and could be changed to load from oldest to new, and sustain your scrolling position. But as they do now, you can sustain your position by fiddling with the loading, and you need to load everything to get back to scrolling if you want to read from oldest to newest.
This button was basically designed for people that sort only by popular, but I think I’m not the onlyone who prefers not to have their microblogs pre-curated by popularity, and I really hate it when I am forced to miss posts just because of the general design practices that are designed for commercialized services.
And as I said in another post, the “trending” -statistics of Mastodon is just a peak, and then forgotten. I have my suspicion that it’s because people do not sort by popular, and by end up missing the stuff that has trended, because design choises like the funcrionality of this button. Surely, the other element is the trending algorithm, and how it is pushed, but that’s a whilly different can of worms to open.
I’m…mixed on situations like these
Like yeah, it’s very annoying having to manually refresh for more content, but at the same time I do appreciate having more time to fully explore my timeline instead of coming back from a post to see they completely discarded my reading place, losing whatever is was looking at, likely forever.
Of course, for quieter networks you may run into the problem of content refreshing too little…
