Post · bonfire.cafe

figured this out: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116583041143972081

we have struggled for awhile with how to make instancewide information salient - announcements aren't exactly that, and many ppl don't know they exist. in particular we wanted to do voting within the instance, but we would have to go and boost the poll a bunch of times and only a few people ended up seeing it.

so this lil change might be of general interest to small instances out there - added the ability for moderators to sticky/unsticky posts and have them stay at the top of local and home feeds. we'll trial it out and see how it goes.

https://github.com/NeuromatchAcademy/mastodon/pull/88

#MastoDev #MastoAdmin

2 media

[A bunch of test posts from a blank @admin account in a test masto instance - one post at the top is labeled STICKY and has a slightly different background color, gold coloring in the username to make it distinct. It's at the top despite being 23h old while more recent posts from the last 18m exist below it.]

A menu button from the status menu now includes "make this post globally sticky" (which switches to "unsticky post" if the post is already sticky)

#mastoadmin #mastodev

Lien Rag

@lienrag@mastodon.tedomum.net · 51 minutes ago

@jonny

Top of local feed is fine, but the home feed is the user's, not something the instance admin should hijack.

(and yes, I know that your instance is free to do what they want, but since you post publicly I suppose that you meant that as a general proposal, so that's what I comment)

jonny (nonvenomous)

@jonny@neuromatch.social · 48 minutes ago

@lienrag
It wasn't a proposal for everyone to do what we do, but instance members participating in shared governance is a documented expectation for our instance.

frog

@frog@frogdrool.net · 2 hours ago

@jonny I like it, even if it wouldn't be much use on my 2 user server. Maybe I'll invite more people eventually.

jonny (nonvenomous)

@jonny@neuromatch.social · 2 hours ago

@frog on a two user server, give everyone admin, and then sticky posts back and forth to be like 'have u seen this'

jonny (nonvenomous)

@jonny@neuromatch.social · 2 hours ago

@frog ig in this implementation they are soft limited to only local posts, but that wasn't written in too hard because i figured someone would have some reason to do something else, idk. only select-side logic enforcing that that can be removed

Peter

@peter@thepit.social · 2 hours ago

@jonny very cool!! this would be super useful, the announcements feature doesn't really cut it, unfortunately.

jonny (nonvenomous)

@jonny@neuromatch.social · 2 hours ago

@peter aside from being invisible, not being able to comment on them is not great. sticky posts seem obvious for any instance that isn't dot social

jonny (nonvenomous)

@jonny@neuromatch.social · 2 hours ago

next thing we need to figure out is how to have local-only polls show how people voted, which is pretty critical to a consensus-oriented system: you can't have silent blocks because then you don't know who has what problems that need to be addressed, and it generally breaks the decisionmaking model. with that, i think we can do governance of the instance from within the instance. only missing thing is a threading interface worth a damn, one can dream.

jonny (nonvenomous)

@jonny@neuromatch.social · 2 hours ago

this also dovetails with another change i had started drafting a few years ago to give posts titles - the idea was that you could have forumlike behavior if you could collapse threads down to being a single line and have them stickied, where the collapsed 'title' view would show you statistics like n posts, n since last read, etc. that was dependent on there also being a reasonable thread view at some point, but the frontend code has shifted pretty dramatically since then and idk if that's in the cards or not.

https://github.com/NeuromatchAcademy/mastodon/pull/35

GitHub

[Feature] Post Titles :) by sneakers-the-rat · Pull Request #35 · NeuromatchAcademy/mastodon

i will write a longer description later but rn jonny is very hungy. anyway it's this: post_titles_blur.mp4 Motivation: One step towards: https://wiki.neurom...

jonny (nonvenomous)

@jonny@neuromatch.social · 2 hours ago

oh i guess i wrote a wiki page on this https://wiki.neuromatch.social/Sticky_Posts

Ember :catplant:

@Ember@blobfox.coffee · 2 hours ago

@jonny ~~then ranked choice voting support /hj~~

jonny (nonvenomous)

@jonny@neuromatch.social · 2 hours ago

@Ember don't tempt me, we'll have to do big modifications to get visible voting. idk as always i am like "how hard could it be" and then rails and redux conspire to be like "oh only the hardest thing you have ever done for no reason"