Idea: Add digest statuses to Mastodon Bookmarks

[BenWard]

Hello! Thinking aloud momentarily, would love your thoughts and gut check on this.

I've been thinking a bit about how to integrate this kind of digest experience more natively into Mastodon. Generating the stand alone HTML is a great POC, but user experience and availability would be improved if we had a way to get the results of the digest into Mastodon itself.

In an ideal world (imho, and I'm very biased having worked on this feature at Twitter previously) Mastodon's platform would implement something akin to Twitter's Collections API (aka “Custom Timelines”), which are effectively “lists for statuses”: A named data store into which people can curate posts in an arbitrary order. An application like Mastodon Digest would then add its filtered posts and boosts into a “Mastodon Digest” timeline, which the user could browse through any client.

Since Mastodon Collections don't exist today, I wonder if this could be prototyped by overriding the Mastodon Bookmarks feature. With a few additions for polish, I imagine this:

1. User would create a token with posting and bookmarks write permission, rather than read only.
2. When a run has matching posts, Mastodon Digest creates a private post “Mastodon Digest for December 19th 2022”, posts it, and adds it to the user's Bookmarks. This would serve as a chapter heading for the posts we've digested.
3. Each filtered post gets added to the user's Bookmarks.
4. The user can then view their bookmarks in any Mastodon client, and act on them in their own instance as they see fit.

Obvious caveat: This is a very opinionated use of the Bookmarks feature and I'm sure wouldn't align with how some people already use it. That's fine. It might work for many people and maybe demonstrate the value of arbitrary custom timelines in Mastodon.

You might activate it with a -b option, allowing the existing functionality to be used to preview and refine the filtering before writing anything to production.

Further thoughts

• Bookmarks does seem to sort posts in reverse-chronological order of when the post was bookmarked, which is what this feature would need in order to ensure the new digest is at the top regardless of post age.
• I'm not sure what happens if you Bookmark a post twice through the API. I'd hope they just get silent ignored, but should verify.
• There's probably an interesting exploration to be done regarding the best order to insert digest posts into Bookmarks: If you enter them in reverse-rank and enter the “Mastodon Digest for…” post last, you'd create the optimal reading experience, but maybe fighting too hard against Mastodon's design and be better to add posts chronologically and have the user scroll backwards.
• Could also have an “end of digest” post added, so that if a user is using Bookmarks for things besides Digests, they'd be better able to identify them in between the digests.
• Running in this kind of native-and-headless mode would also lend itself to running Digest as a scheduled service for multiple-users.

Love your thoughts. Thanks.

[hodgesmr]

Overall, I really like all the ideas here, though I'd probably default to saying they're out of scope for this repository. This might be the beginning of new tools or integrations!

A more specific reaction:

Each filtered post gets added to the user's Bookmarks.

David Colarusso has been doing some interesting work along these lines with their David's Alter (Algo) Ego bot. As I understand it, the bot sources posts in a very similar fashion to Mastodon Digest, but boosts them. All boosts are marked as unlisted, and (I think) David has that bot in a list that they can toggle to so to see the boosts. I believe David mentioned they explored almost exactly the bookmark idea you present, but worried about clobbering the other common uses of bookmarks. (Tagging @colarusso in case they wish to share more about this thought process!)

[hodgesmr]

Closing this. I think it's an interesting discussion and idea, but out of scope for this project.