Question for those who use the first party Micro.blog app.

When you open the app, it auto shows the latest post at the top. Do you start there and scroll down in reverse time order, or scroll scroll scroll down to where you remember last seeing something and start there?

@Burk I used to use Icro and brought my habits of completionism over when I switched back to the first-party app. But as I’ve let go of completionism, it’s been nice to come in and just browse from the latest on down. I like having the different options in the two apps.

@Burk scroll down from top. I don't think I follow even a double digit percentage of people who are on here now, so it's a quiet place. :)

@Burk I start at the top and scroll down (going back in time).

@Burk This is a source of several times daily frustration to me: I scroll, scroll, scroll to get back to the last place I read (and then a bit more to catch items that arrived since) and then read upwards. It’s very annoying.

@Burk I start with new and scroll down. I stop when I see something familiar. Sometimes sooner. I’m not a completist. 🙂

@Burk I read from the top until I have to do something else, or catch up (normally the former).

@Burk I prefer not to have auto-refresh so that I can pick up where I left off. I appreciate apps that preserve their states (even returning into the web browser when I’ve drilled into a URL).

I guess that makes me a bit of a control freak, wanting my actions to drive the app, not having it decide when to refresh. 🤔

@Burk I tend to scroll down until I feel I’m reading the same stuff 😂

@Burk If the time elapsed is short enough, at the right time of day, that there aren’t likely to be more than a handful of posts, I’ll scroll down and read back up.

Typically, though, there are going to be 3 or more “Show More”s involved to get to where I left off (and then beyond that, to posts that filled in earlier in time after I left off), so it’s saner to start from the top and read backwards in time.

@Burk Unfortunately I start at the top. I say unfortunately because I don’t check it all day and it takes too much scrolling - and once there something always happens that causes the app to auto-scroll back to the op $&^! I run into this basically every time I use the app.

@ronguest What software do you use to read with, on which this happens? It happens for me on Dialog and it's the one thing I hate the most, but I've never been sure whether this is a bug in Dialog or in micro.blog itself. It is extremely maddening! Surely the software should be designed to allow the user, and ONLY the user, to control the scrolling, not with some automaticity outside the control of the user. As you may be able to notice, this is a sore point with me.

@Ron @Ron I use the official MB app on iOS (iPad mostly). I believe Icro has a different behavior but it lacks other features. I even offered to bribe Manton to change this behavior 😝

@ronguest It's an obvious flaw. So now I know it's not a Dialog bug, it's built in to Manton's software! Wow, I can't imagine why he would think it's a good idea to have it that way. I can't think of a single good reason to have it that way. But he's not interested in what I think, so I won't even try to talk with him about it. It's too bad to have such an outstanding platform be marred with such rude behavior.

@Ron @ronguest Just to clarify, I also wish that the official Micro.blog apps preserved the scroll position. It's a limitation in the current apps but it's something I've wanted to address for a long time. Icro is a great example of scrolling done right.

@manton I don't understand. You're the software engineer who built/builds this thing. Don't you control every aspect about it? There are somehow forces of nature causing things to happen that you (and we) don't want? I've never heard about anything like this. If Icro does it right, then it can be done. Right? Why not do what they're doing then?

@Ron I think it's a question of time...it's on his list just not got round to it. Hell we only just got resizable window in the mac app :)

@Ron With enough time, yes. The way the Micro.blog iOS app is built technically makes it tricky to change this behavior. There are a lot of competing priorities... It was a trade-off to simplify the timeline refresh so that we could work on other things.

@kaa 🙂

@Burk start at the top and scrolling down. However, if the app could save the reading position I would definitely prefer that.

@the I’m the opposite. I’ll admit that it can be convenient when a web browser brings you back to where you left off but most of the time I find it irritating: “why are you wasting time loading a page I’ve already read?” So, yeah, in Micro.blog I read from the top, until I get to something that seems familiar or get distracted by something else.

@Burk I start at the top and work down until I get distracted or I find something I recognize, which tends to be my usual on social media. I am just so very happy the isn’t an Algorithm reordering things. Chronology (or in this case reverse) is important context.

@Burk I scroll a lot, then work my way up to the top. Which is why I use Icro on iOS.

@furstenberg same here

@kaa Can you point me to the list? I try to read much of what gets posted, but I obviously missed it. If I could have seen the list, I would have known not to even mention it, thus saving myself the embarrassment of pointlessly bringing something up that's already on the list to be fixed. Are there ETA's for the various things on the list?