So when scrolling my feed I can see the total comments and total new comments, for example 27 +19 (where the +19 is in green). Would it be possible to have those 19 new comments “marked” in some way so I can quickly scroll and identify them? Wouldn’t have to be flashy, maybe even just a green dot or something next to the commenter’s username, or some sort of different binding/italicizing to highlight it?

TIA!

  • nocturne@slrpnk.netEnglish
    4·
    12 hours ago

    This was something I requested ages ago, however, unless it has been added since, there is nothing in the api for this. I have been meaning to add a feature request to piefed for the feature with api support. @wsj018@piefed.social

    • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      6 hours ago

      Can’t you track which posts (and when) people view locally, in your app? Then when displaying comments compare the comment time with the last-viewed-post time to determine if it’s new.

      @wjs018@piefed.social

      • Sjmarf@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        We could do, but ideally it would be implemented on the backend - some people use PieFed on both mobile and desktop, and storing the last read count locally wouldn’t carry over properly between clients. Lemmy 1.0 has backend support for this feature.

        • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
          1·
          5 hours ago

          I’d like to survey our users on this to see how they feel about what they read being tracked in this way.

          Some time ago I floated the idea of somehow highlighting/prioritizing comments by people who had clicked the link to the article. People who mouth off without reading the article are a pain in the ass so I wanted to somehow de-emphasize those. The feedback I got at the time was pretty strongly “no I don’t want you knowing what I read”. It’s too easy to do big data stuff on it to build profiles on people, I guess. It wasn’t a proper poll, just people commenting so it’s hard to know what the silent majority thinks.

          So I’m a bit wary about it now.

          • Sjmarf@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            4 hours ago

            If there was a readAt date for the post, we’d be able to highlight comments created since that date. I don’t think tracking a readAt date is much different from tracking a read boolean, which you’re already doing. It could always be made opt-out, if people are concerned about it. Having the date that someone read a post isn’t as exploitable as the link click tracking you mention, I don’t think.

          • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
            1·
            5 hours ago

            Any suggestions for how to word the survey question? How it’s framed will make a big difference to the result.

    • wjs018@piefed.socialEnglish
      5·
      11 hours ago

      @blaze@piefed.zip has been asking for this feature for ages and @Skavau@piefed.social made an issue for it on the codeberg already. The reason this isn’t in the api yet is because it isn’t anywhere in piefed yet. AFAIK, the read/unread status of comments isn’t currently tracked anywhere within piefed. Additionally, for this feature, I don’t believe we track the timestamp at which you do interact with a post…so doing something like calculating the number of new comments that have occurred since you last opened that post isn’t possible…yet.

      I don’t have a great idea of how to do this in a db-efficient way. Keeping track of when every user opens each post sounds like db-query hell. However, there might be clever caching tricks to make it a bit less computationally intense. @rimu@piefed.social would likely have a better idea of how to do this.

      • Sjmarf@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        5 hours ago

        Thanks for the info :) Lemmy 1.0 tracks a readAt timestamp; maybe it’s worth looking at how they’re doing it.