It would be such a tiny thing to implement on the #Mastodon web client, but I wish we could get the little "Hide" button for the images that are attached to news article links too.

I really don't need so many pictures of "him" in my timeline, but I may still like to see the article headlines to consider clicking through.

#UX #MastodonWebClient #featureRequest

@gme tried it in #MastodonWebclient and #Tusky
Conclusion: Not text formatting for me for now. Not life threatening 😉

A quick blog post as this was getting too long for a Mastodon post.

For most people social media comes as a dedicated app these days. However, all of the services can be accessed via a web browser too and usually this gives access to a more feature rich experience. I’m the web browser kind of person, trying to find out everything you can do with a specific social media service and to bend them to my needs wherever possible – but I have also used apps, when they were well done, like Tweetbot.

I’m not sure about the terminology as I’m not a programmer but I’ve come across the term “frontend” recently and from what I understand, this means the interface that is used to access the main service. So an app would be a typical frontend that people are familiar with, presenting a service in its own unique way. There are also “web clients”, they do the same but within a web browser. Some of them are made by the same people who own the service, some aren’t. They all have in common that you need to enter your service credentials and trust the interface owners not to abuse them.

With everything that happened to Twitter/X a lot of people were looking for a replacement that offered a similar experience. A number of apps and web clients for Mastodon were developed to provide that to a degree but because Twitter/X and Mastodon are not the same this did not always work out. See a list of web clients here, some popular apps are Ivory, IceCubes, etc.

Some of the frontends to services kind of warp the original service experience quite a bit. It should not really have surprised me that much as I had come across web clients for Mastodon already that tried to do that too but there is one called Newsmast that does it even more so than others. Newsmast is a Mastodon project centred around “communities”. It gathers posts from across the Fediverse (e.g. from Pixelfed) and presents them as feeds/streams/channels (not sure what to call them) that people can subscribe too. This helps quite a lot when you are new to the Fediverse and struggle with finding content for your home feed that suits you. I can see this feature being appealing to newcomers.

The one thing I really don’t like about Newsmast is its preselection of social links users can enter. There is everything I want to stay away from and Twitter does not even exist under that name anymore. Even though Newsmast is part of the Fediverse and actively pulls in posts from all kinds of Fediverse services into its “communities” feeds, there are no other Fediverse services listed in the “Socials” and the only field that allows you to enter a “free” link is the Website one. I just tried entering my Pixelfed account under Instagram and it was reformatted into an Instagram address. It’s like Newsmast is living in the past, sorry.

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The best place to comment or ask questions about this post is my Mastodon – Testing account: Sylkeweb on Mastodon

https://sylkeweb.com/2023/11/17/mastodon-frontends-newsmast/

#ActivityPub #Fediverse #HowToFediverse #Mastodon #MastodonFrontEnd #MastodonWebClient #Newsmast #Pixelfed #SylkewebBlog #TestingTheFediverse

Mastodon web clients/front ends. How many are there? I’ve seen Elk and another one that didn’t have a very memorable name but made lots of columns. And now Newsmast.
I’d like to see more.
#MastodonFrontEnd #MastodonWebClient

The "official" Android Mastodon app is pretty pleasant!

Which is encouraging--if the folks who are responsible for the mobile app apply a similar, sustained, user-centric design effort to reimagining the default web app and sign up flow I think it could make a real difference to Mastodon's viability as a widely adopted platform.

Which is something I think we should want, if we don't trust for-profit social media platforms.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/10/mastodon-for-android-update/

#Mastodon #MastodonWebUI #MastodonWebClient

I've noticed that I can't play an #AnimatedGIF in the #MastodonWebClient in #Firefox.

All my autoplay pref's are disabled in about:config which works nicely to stop video ads and such junk, but I'd still like to be able to see a GIF play in a post on Masto if I select it.

Don't mind having to select it to make it play. Any insight about how to do that?

My setting for the pref image.animation_mode is at "normal" currently which I thought was the related switch.

#firefox #aboutConfig

I am curious about web-based Mastodon interfaces that are NOT the default one I see when I log in to Universodon.com... Like, I stumbled upon https://elk.zone, which seems very nice, and I'm wondering what other alternatives might be available to the public? Maybe @feditips knows or has a post on this? #mastoclient #MastodonWebClient

https://fe.soapbox.pub/
Falls ihr bei Masto das Twittergefühl vermisst.

#Mastodon #MastodonWebClient