Generic timelines

[elegaanz]

This is a proposal to re-work our approach to timelines, to make it more flexible. The idea would be to have different timelines stored in the database. A timeline is basically a list of posts, and some rules to know if a post belongs to this timeline or not.

The benefits would be that it would be easier to customize the feeds on the homepage (one could select the timelines to display) hiding the federated feed on a personal blog, or showing various hashtag timelines on themed instances. It would also allow to organize your subscriptions, and eventually keep an eye on blogs without even following them.

I can see two problem to this approach:

• would the performances be good enough? Handling timelines this way would probably mean that we should check if a post should go in all the existing timelines when it is created/received (currently the feeds are computed on request every time we display them).
• how do we store the rules for a timeline in the database, as they should ideally follow a complex logic (so that we could build, for instance, a timeline with only a specific hashtag, from specific instances but excluding a some blogs)

(I didn't opened a Loomio discussion because this seemed to be a technical discussion, but I can copy my message over there if needed)

Plume version (and/or commit): 0.2.0