I always wished that Twitter, and now Mastodon, would show me how people reposting a thing I said had discovered that I said it. When someone popular reposts it, I think lots of people then see it from there and repost it because the popular person brought it to their attention. It would be cool to see that graph; to see how a thing you said spread out into the world. It'd look something like this, and I always wish I knew who the red person was.
100% agree. This is both for positive and abusive use cases. I was SORTOF able to do this manually on Twitter but it was always tedious.
The information SHOULD be there so I would hope a client (or maybe just a utility?) could do this.
@sil Google+ had something like that in the early days. It got removed at some point, so presumably it either wasn't that popular, or was a lot more expensive to maintain than it looked.
@sil It was called "ripples". Here's a short video they created demonstrating the feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j0I1a_Aw4g
In addition to seeing the current share graph, you could also scrub back and forward in time to see how it grew.
@jamesh ooh that’s neat!
@sil You could also give it a URL as a starting point, which would show ripples for all posts that included that link. It was pretty cool being able to see how a blog post or news article spread over time.
It was always buried in the UI, so I could totally believe that they killed it due to low use.
@sil similarly the ability to mark a post as read. Sometimes I see a boosted post I really like, but the tenth time it pops up it starts getting on my nerves. This kind of graph could also minimise it.
@rowan_m agreed! That would be useful
@sil @rowan_m I want read status for all posts. I want an email-client- or RSS-reader-style fediverse client.
Better yet, I want it to be part of my e-mail client (since I've already merged RSS reader into my email client).
The only problem is that fediverse then starts to look a lot like good old mailing lists and you start to suspect they were actually better... :)
@tomayac @rowan_m @sil There is "Group boosts in timelines" option in [your.server]/settings/preferences/other ...
I assume the reason Mastodon shows the same boosted post in the timeline after some time anyway is that it doesn't know whether you've seen it before because it is blindly copying Twitter's scrolling timeline model which doesn't care what you've read or not as long as you are consuming "content".
@sil as cool as such a function would be, i don't think it would work well in the federation model of the fediverse unfortunately. a single boost would have to hit too many instances and fediblocks can prevent boosts from reaching the target instance, so it's likely that it would be incomplete anyway.
@Hanicef I don’t think I follow? What it needs is, when I boost a post, I attach to that boost record a note saying why I saw the post I’m boosting, which is something my client knows — am I looking at the original because I follow the poster, or am I looking at someone else’s boost of the original, in which case I record who that booster was in my boost.
This would have been harder to do on Twitter with the algorithmic timeline, but I think it works here?
@sil ah, i see. i thought you meant that it would track who boosted something and notify when someone boosted a post through your boost, thus cascading notifications through instances. the only problem would be that instances that don't support that feature wouldn't be tracked, but otherwise it's feasible.
@Hanicef yeah; if you want to put together the graph you have to chase down all the links in it. It’s not automatic. But I am notified when anybody boosts my thing, so adding “and this is why they saw it” to that notification feels doable, I reckon. (I haven’t looked at activitypub boosts enough to know already.)
@sil it's me, hi, I'm the problem it's me
No but really I would love to see this too!
@stonehippo @baldur I wonder how they worked that out? Guesswork? Assuming that you saw the tweet from the first person in your followed list who tweeted it?
I think this would be possible to do by poking mastodon/activitypub stuff to add a new field to the Announce activity (which is what a boost is, under the covers) to indicate the person who boosted the post that you're re-boosting, and then it'd be unambiguous and quite useful. Not sure how to make that happen. @Gargron may know?
@sil Usual obsession: would it be a tree? What if I ignore the link the first three times but then it's someone who isn't easily triggered, or I've seen something else in the meantime which makes it more interesting? I think it's an ordered, directed acyclic? graph and yes, I've thought about this far too much.
@sil TLDR; "Events, dear boy". Time (and hence our ideas) arrive as a sequence of events, which we may choose to ignore.
@sil Need to consider the information exposure for small private groups too. E.g. someone with a private profile (A) retoots, their friend (B) retoots, someone on a more public instance retoots (C) from there. Possibly exposing information about the relationship between A and B
@PulsarSkate good point! I hadn't thought about someone with a private profile, whose followers and followings can't be seen. I think in such situations the "I saw this via" field that's added to a boost would be left blank, which will always be part of things anyway since that field isn't even there right now and so is blank by definition.
@sil @palaniraja yep this is something we are doing daily at Predicta Lab