Mu personal home-feed

@mu.social enlivens a protopian imagination in me; it invites visions of a "social media app mosaic" that makes its users better people, neighbors and citizens.

It's a fun enough website that I check it out on a daily basis, but I still can't honestly say whether it makes me more happy than it makes me anxious.

I have a contentious relationship with the firehose feed. It's not the right shape for my sensibilities, never has been. That doesn't mean I don't want to be a participant in the global conversation, I just don't like having a glut of information fed to me at high velocity and for uncapped time periods.

Two changes in the social-app client would make a world of difference to my social media experience.

Customizable Home

Following Bluesky's lead, mu equates "home" to the firefose-feed.

Meanwhile it's got other top-level app modalities like 'news-feed' and 'messages-feed' that could just as easily be the home default.

Make news the universal default and mu becomes a 'social news reader' more so than an archetypical 'social media app'.

But I want neither as my personal default. I want an inbox.

mu threads

Right now the only kind of thread the social-app client knows how to render is the bluesky-defined thread in the microblog format. This can and will change.

rough mockup of new 'My threads' feed

My favorite feed is on discourse.atmosphere.community, and thanks to standard.site support in Discourse this feed can now be parsed by the mu client.

@roomy.space is coordinating with @colibri.social @userinput.app & @barazo.forum to figure out common lexicons for the internet-forum variety of threads.

DM conversations, especially among groups, are effectively just long-running threads as well.

Home renovation

So, instead of defaulting to the firehose-feed we switch to the threads-feed, i.e. ongoing threads I'm subscribed to by having participated in them or explicitly opted to track.

Any and all threads I'm following from across the entire atmosphere, ordered chronologically by latest activity. These are the persistent threads that I have a vested interest in moving continuously forward, albeit asynchronously and never all at once.

I wanna know the latest in my local circles of coherence, not the latest of the town square. The former is an inbox I can actually complete, while the latter can only ever be a narrow and somewhat arbitraty snapshot of the global network. I don't want to restart the conversation every 24hrs, I wanna continue right where I left off last night.

The feed(s) view would still be there of course, just on a non-default tab.

What is a 'new post/thread' in this context? I can't say for sure yet but I think the post-type will be determined by where you are posting to, which might necessarily need to come before the what.

That'd be a social app I can actually vibe with.

Conscientious Poasting

Once private data is a reality we can even imagine a default way of posting that is more akin to a personal diary.

Write whatever is on your mind, first-thought-best-thought, just for you. Then decide where else you might wanna share it to, and who with.

Your local threads from the atmosphere: A calmer, more deliberative posting environment.