So … good news, bad news situation with yesterday’s experiment with putting some of the more high-volume people I follow on to lists and unfollowing them 😛

My hometimeline was so much leaner and cleaner today. There were very few replies and I just got posts that I was actually interested in and was through my home timeline in record time since I had like one third the normal volume of posts.

On the other hand, the list had not moved at all since I created it yesterday, except for one post 😀

Now if I’d stopped to think about this before I came up with my “brilliant” plan, I would have realized this — given the philosophy behind Mastodon/Fediverse, I don’t think anybody really wants you following people without the followee knowing/approving the action. So, creating lists the way Twitter allowed you to would not make much sense from a privacy standpoint.

Unfortunately, that makes lists a rather useless feature in the Fediverse since, as far as I know, there is no server-side filtering of posts from lists from your main timeline. If you just scroll through and read a bit and don’t care about duplicates, this is fine. But if you obsessively go through every post till you are caught up, like I do, then this becomes annoying pretty fast 😛

So my plan at the moment is to implement client-side filtering. When posts are fetched from the server for the home timeline, see if any of the fetched posts are authored by, replies to, or boosts by people on any of my lists. If they are, filter out those posts since they will be displayed on the lists.

I’m not sure how CPU intensive this will be and how smooth the experience will be. But I’m going to try and find out …

#Lists #Following #FediStuff #FediClients

@f Duplication is exactly the problem I have with #lists here, and despite mentioning it here some weeks ago, zero engagement. Unlike you, I haven't got the dedication to get into client-side filtering.

@wavesculptor To be fair, most people won’t be able to engage since they might not know what to do about it either 🙂

There is an open issue for Mastodon for this feature but I’m not sure if it’s being actively worked on:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/6982

If it’s not, then some of the things that can be done would be:

1. Implement it yourself (I do realize you’ve said that’s not an option for you but just listing it for the sake of completeness …)

2. Get a build from somebody who implemented it (If you are on macOS I’d be happy to share my build if you want it … provided I get it implemented right)

3. Lobby your favourite Masto/Fedi client developer(s) to implement this feature for you …

I originally thought that this didn’t work for unfollowed Akkoma accounts but I’m not absolutely certain now since I’m getting some posts on the list I created for accounts that I’m not following. But I’m not sure if this is Akkoma, a fluke, or some sort of federation delays. So I’ll have to give it a few days and then see what might need to happen. But if it works for Akkoma, then you also have option #4 — set up your own instance of Akkoma or move to an Akkoma server since that might resolve the issue for you.

@f Thanks for the #Akkoma suggestion.

I'm running #Linux.

Issue I saw flagged is that appearing on a #list assumed a content rights infringement by not to constituting a follow. This never occurred to me, as it is a #nonSequitur that appearing on ONLY lists must be not-a-follow. One just renders list-account postings in the appropriate list rather than the timeline!

@wavesculptor Personally, I wasn’t seeing non-followed people on a list as a rights violation but more of a privacy violation since those people might not know that you are monitoring their posts and they have not explicitly agreed to you seeing those posts …

I know that there are arguments for both side on this but I can see how this can be misused to stalk people without their knowledge. So I do see the issue there.

What the Mastodon issue I linked to in the previous reply discusses is around the fact that you can require following to add a user to a list but that if the user is on a list, their posts are filtered out from the main timeline. That seems like a good compromise to me, but unfortunately, I have no idea if they’ll actually implement that or not 🙂

@f sort-of what I meant - the right to know who's following you!

@wavesculptor I misread what you wrote originally, I thought you were saying that that’s how lists worked, but I realize now that you were saying that that is how it *should* happen. And you are right, that’s how it should have been implemented.

But looks as if it wasn’t implemented that way and so lists are basically a pointless feature at the moment since it duplicates content and is generally annoying 🙂

Will somebody fix it from the server end? I have no idea. But if I can find a good JavaScript open source client (not one with lots of libraries that require yarn or webpack) which is fairly feature complete, I might attempt the task on the client-side using that. Haven’t found such a client yet though 😞 Which was why I was thinking of implementing it on the client that I use now but that would limit the number of people who can use it to people running iOS or macOS …