Apparently I’m the edge case in the timeline slide
Even before the former Twitter, now called X like some random porn site, I got used to reading timelines chronologically and completely, but displaying them in reverse chronological order. So the now is always at the top and I read bottom to top until I arrive in the now and hit a natural barrier that gives me a chance to quit (or move to the next timeline). When I come back, this requires the timeline to have stopped at the same point so that I can catch up from there towards now.
Also since the time before the former Twitter, now called X like some random porn site, I’ve been desperately looking for a client who is able not to constantly spit in the soup with my actions. Tumblr, for example, just always started in the now and opened up endless downward scrolling, so that if you weren’t there for a long time, you ultimately had no realistic chance of getting the entire timeline without gaps. In addition, during long sessions, another app had to be opened from time to time and the memory manager of the smartphone was happy to shut down the Tumblr app, which was probably memory-hungry because of the many pictures. It was annoying, but with all that porn at the time, it wasn’t that much of a problem.
It was different with Identi.ca and later with Twitter and now with Mastodon (I threw the strange porn site X off my phone and haven’t really missed it since), because over the years I’ve used a wide variety of third-party clients, some of which are more or less reliable kept the last position. When that was unreliable, it drove me crazy, as was the case recently with the original Twitter client: there it happened more and more frequently that I didn’t start in the now or the last time I read, but either in the algorithmically generated and completely useless for me completely confused chaos timeline or much more annoying a few tens to a few hundred tweets in the past before the last reading time. I suspect some kind of bug behind it, because nobody really wants that. Maybe it was a mind game too, to shove me into the chaos timeline, to shove questionable stuff in there that I very deliberately don’t want to see (mental hygiene and such).
But what has accompanied me through all the years and clients, sometimes more sometimes less pronounced, is the hectic swiping gesture when I come across a “Load more” gap. Most clients still have the readings last displayed in the cache and fetch the newest ones from the server when they re-enter, usually 50 or 100. This is not a problem if you use it frequently, but if you haven’t been there for two or three days, you scroll up into a more or less large gap in time. The clients then usually show a button for refilling the gap, but if you tap on it, you end up at the top of the filled gap with all the clients I know (because it is filled down), so you have skipped 50 or 100 reading pieces, when scrolling up. If you have to do this several times in a row, it is hardly possible to find the previous reading again.
So all these years I’ve been waiting for some client to come up with the funnel of making the reading direction adjustable or even recognizing it and then filling the gap in the right direction, i.e. from the current scrolling position up for me, but the My wish was never fulfilled. However, there are differences between the clients in terms of how well my workaround works and I’m currently happiest with Tusky: I tap the button and then very quickly wipe the underlying and last read position up out of the visible area and pause then a few seconds in the static but active scroll state. In about 90% of the cases I succeed and when I scroll back, my reading area hasn’t jumped and I can continue reading at the correct place or I have to go through the thing two or three more times and hope. In the other cases, everything has jumped and I have to find the actual reading point again.
I still dream of a future where my apparent reading order edge case is honored somewhere. Am I really alone with my preference? How do others read their chronological timelines? Again and again, like Tumblr back then, from now to the past, until you hopefully get somewhere where it looks familiar? And if you’ve finished on the toilet beforehand, do you already have two gaps the next time you visit, then three and so on?
With my feed reader, by the way, I read the other way around: the old articles are at the top and I read down to the now. This is because I often leave articles unread (sometimes for a very long time) if they are too long for the current situation or if I want to stumble across them again in a different context.
What is missing, by the way, is a synchronization of the reading position across different devices. This is indispensable for my feed readers, which is why I have been running my own instance of the FreshRSS software as a backend for my changing feed reader apps since the inglorious end of Google Reader. For some third party Twitter clients there was such a service initially but it kind of got discontinued or got paid for and then discontinued if I remember correctly. But I miss this feature a lot and neither the web interface of Twitter nor that of Mastodon can do that, although it would actually be easy to implement there because you could simply attach the reading position to the profile. Apparently I really am an edge case.
Addendum: Helpful feedback came directly from Mastodon. For Apple devices, there are probably two Mastodon clients that address the problem: Ivory (paid app) and Metatext (free and open source). Metatext even automatically recognizes the reading direction and uses arrows to indicate the direction in which the text will be filled. I am touched and once again a little contrite that there seems to be more emphasis on UX (user experience) when it comes to apps for Apple systems. Thanks to Ernst and Sylke for the tips and other feedback: I’m not alone at all.
(Gregor Meyer)