I continue to struggle with the limit-less nature of the MB timeline. Moving through paragraphs of text intermingled with columns of photographs isn’t my preferred scrolling experience.
However; “Read more” links and side-scrolling widgets often feel… fragile? So idk. A tough nut to crack.
@SimonWoods Much of the timeline UI is actually designed around discouraging truncated text and "read more" links. If you go over to Facebook or Threads, for example, you will see truncated posts all over the place.
@simonwoods I think @manton once mentioned ‘rolling up’ multiple photos in a post, perhaps presenting them in a horizontally scrollable panel. Twitter/Mastodon present them in a grid. A treatment like that would improve the experience tremendously. I always feel guilty when I have a post with multiple photos as I know it takes up a lot of space here.
@manton Here I am showing my lack of experience with Facebook in recent years; the last time I was there, and felt negatively about it was a time when all I saw were lots of paragraphs that were so ready to better read (and displayed) either on a blog or in a feed reader. I need to spend some time looking more closely at the other platforms so that I can further my thoughts on these ideas.
As a bonus, it's good research for the work I'm doing on TIL. Ironically, now that I'm properly working on the project it has become the reason for these posts to exist at all. Work on the thing -> think about the things -> work on the thing -> think about the things, and on...
@manton Technically, text posts with > 300/600 characters are truncated. But posts with ten photos are not. So there's a disconnect there in terms of design. Other platforms have solved this problem @SimonWoods @paulrobertlloyd
@paulrobertlloyd @manton I always liked how posts from Sunlit were handled in the timeline, and was then confused as to why it was limited to just the app; just like the superior reply experience, although I think at least some of that has been ported over to the main apps.
@pratik Is there somebody doing something other than that side-scrolling thing in Threads? I don't really like that as much as other people seem to — it's a clever way to separate the app from Instagram for sure, and on first glance feels quite fresh.
@paulrobertlloyd Yes, I like what Threads does for multiple photos. Something like that is what we should do.
@manton @paulrobertlloyd Gluon now displays posts with multiple photos as a side scrolling. I have liked that as a way to display them in the timeline. @vincent
@crossingthethreshold @manton @SimonWoods @pratik @paulrobertlloyd — Gluon will display side scrolling images if there is more than one photo in a timeline item. I think that’s a good balance between broken content and too many images in one go. More that could be improved here.
@SimonWoods The other option is a grid of thumbnails. Mastodon does it that way, but then it restricts it to only four images.