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As a fediverse power user, I'd really like to have 2 separate feeds populated by my follows;
* Firehose; anything that someone on the service I use, including me, might find interesting.
* Home; stuff I definitely want to read on a regular basis
Is this an experience anyone else can relate to?
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Mastodon has lists, but they're kind of a bolt-on. A lot of apps don't fully support them, or bury them so deep in the interface I forget they exist.
What I'm wanting looks like all-follows being a built-in list, set as the default Home feed. Then, when it starts to become a firehose, being able to choose a different list to be my Home feed.
I'm finding Ivory reasonably good for a similar workflow. I start with a Don't Miss list, then when that's finished go to Friends, then New Zealand, then News. I get to home about once a week, but never get close to catching up there.
I could see a UI that made this kind of workflow central.
@TerryHancock
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@isaacfreeman
> the issue is with client apps not making them easy to use?
I guess so. If the Home feed was a follow-all list, and there was an option to choose a different list as Home, that would do exactly what I need.
Any chance of getting that on the roadmap for @moshidon and other apps?
How do I do that? I had a poke around the list manager and the settings, but can't see any way to make a list come up when I tap Home, instead of the standard follow-all.
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In fact, I don't even know if it always makes sense for Home to be the default. For new accounts, it would be better for Local or Federated to be default, with the follow-all firehose introduced in the interface upon first follow. Progressive disclosure FTW!
#HatTip to @tchambers, whose recent piece on fediverse UX got me thinking along these lines
https://www.timothychambers.net/2025/06/24/the-seven-deadly-fediverse-ux.html
Hey cool. I guess the idea is your have your friends in Home, people you enjoy talking to and want to do that more. Then Excluded from Home lists are for people you follow more for their topical posts. Nice.
@moshidon has this, but I might set up an alt account to test it out on. Been meaning to set one up for Disintermedia.
Also, everyone goes in a List anyway, and at any time I can exclude all of them from Home and see if there were any I missed. The whole thing gives you granular control over how much is appearing in your Home feed.
Yeah. I have Exclusive Lists for "Brands" and "Celebs" -- basically people who wouldn't want to converse, anyway. Since they're not in my "Home" stream, it preserves the more conversational nature of that feed.
I have a couple of other special interest lists.
Far from perfect: Mastodon only displays 4 lists in the web interface (+ "Lists" to see the rest), and they're chosen *alphabetically*. 馃檮
But it does work.
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@TerryHancock
> people who wouldn't want to converse, anyway. Since they're not in my "Home" stream, it preserves the more conversational nature of that feed
That makes a lot of sense. Separating parasocial follows from 2-way connections. Other fedi software, particularly the Friendica branch of the family, supports that distinction more explicitly. I just wish they had better UX.
In Mastodon, I end up using Home as a Firehose, and Subscribe to get notifications from the few accounts whose posts I never want to miss. But this just moves the problem sideways. Instead of being lost in the firehose of my Home feed, they end up lost in the firehose of my notifications.
I follow many accounts just to populate search (searches on Mastodon can only find stuff that's born on the service you use, or from someone followed by an account on your service).
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@strypey are you using the 3 column layout in a browser? See your profile settings. It gives me Home, Notifications, and Feed (local or federated) firehose.
Hell no. That thing is kryptonite for an ADHDer trying to focus on one thing. I mainly use Android apps (FediLab for a long time, more recently Moshidon), sometimes web apps (#HatTip to Enafore.social), and very occasionally a desktop app (Tuba on GNU/Linux).
I use vanilla Mastodon so little that if you were able to swap it out for Akkoma, I wouldn't notice until I went to post a freudian typo : P
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