Distinguish when someone follows you back

[jsoref]

There are three follow flows:

1. You follow an account and then it follows you back
2. An account follows you
3. An account follows you and you follow them back

Each of these will result in a notification for:

account followed you

Ideally the first case would show:

account followed you back

– this means you don't need to check their profile and decide to follow them, because you're already following them.

Ideally the third case would show:

account followed you, and you are now following them

... or something similar. (I don't have preferred text for this and an happy to cross this bridge later.)

Today, all three show:

account followed you

– which could be limited to the second case. This is the only case where you might want to decide to follow them back because you aren't already following them.

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• Tusky Version: Tusky Test 20.0 beta 1-a4727716

• Android Version:

• Android Device:

• Mastodon instance (if applicable):

• I searched or browsed the repo’s other issues to ensure this is not a duplicate.

[kylegoetz]

Do flows 1 and 3 need to be distinguished? Couldn't it be just they follow you vs they follow you back (regardless of who follows whom first)

[jsoref]

I'm not certain. Probably mostly only in that you'd be concerned to a different text, possibly something like:

You are mutually following them.

(I couldn't find up with any good text for 3 service is why I've mostly punted on it.)

[nikclayton]

The Mastodon API doesn't distinguish between these three cases.

In addition, the Mastodon API does not report when account A started following account B, so it's not possible to construct a timeline to figure out which account followed first.

I think the most that could be done is "Account A is following you, and you also follow them" (or "... and you do not follow them") or similar.

So this is probably not feasible.

[jsoref]

It's perfectly fine to show "An account followed you back" for a notification if it's a "current notification" (w/in some recent time interval from "now") and you're following it.

For a notification that's not in a recent interval of now it's fine to show "An account followed you (and you are following it)"

For a notification where you aren't following, the notification would retrain the current message "An account followed you".