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Bubble v7.0: Subspace Views, Grouped Posts, New Feed Options and User Actions

It has been four months since the previous Bubble feature update. This is plenty of time to observe how I and others have been using the system and think of potential improvements. This release makes substantial changes to show useful information that was previously unavailable, gives you more control over what is displayed on the front page, and applies a host of smaller tweaks to improve general usability.

Viewing Subspace Activity

Until now, there has only been a rudimentary alphabetical list of all the subspaces. Version 7 adds new ways to look at subspaces to get a better view into the activity on the capsule.

There are four different view modes on the /s/ page:

"Index" is the equivalent to the old index: a simple list of all the subspaces.
"Summary" and "Chronological Summary" add a one-line summary to each listed subspace, with the total number of posts and time of most recent activity. The latter view sorts the subspaces in reverse chronological order so one can see which ones have been active recently.
"Activity" is the most detailed view. The subspaces are divided into four different categories: active, inactive, empty, and pending archival. For each subspace, the total number of posts and comments is listed along with the number of people (individual users who have either posted or commented), and also the title of the latest post and its timestamp.

The Activity view in particular will be a tool for the administrator to facilitate subspace cleanup. Empty and dormant subspaces will be easy to spot and take care of.

There is one more new way to monitor the health of a subspace: the moderator(s) of a subspace will be shown as dormant if they have not been active for a long time. (Things like visiting your Dashboard and opening notifications count as activity.) Moderation is important for keeping a subspace on topic, so it may be necessary to assign an additional moderator if the previous one has gone missing.

Grouped Posts

To keep the front page feed more balanced, posts from each subspace are grouped and only one of the grouped posts is visible per each day of posting. Every 15 minutes, the visible post rotates in each grouping.

As an example, if someone makes ten posts on one day in their userspace, only one of them will be shown at a time on the front page. Throughout the day, which one of the ten is shown keeps changing.

A group of posts is indicated by a "(+n other posts)" label that appears next to the subspace/user link. Opening the link goes to a new Grouped Posts page that shows a mini-feed of only the posts in the group.

This new rotation feature is enabled by default when using All Posts as the front page feed. To see every individual post like before, you can disable rotation in:

Settings > Display

New Feed Options

The home feed shown on the front page can be customized further:

In addition to "All Posts" and "Followed", there are now feeds that exclude userspaces and only include userspaces.
Posts can be sorted by "Activity". This is a greatly simplified version of the Hotness sort order in that it only considers the latest comment time. In practice, when someone comments on a post, it will get bumped back on top of the feed.
There is also a new special mode called "Unified timeline" that shows comments as part of the feed together with top-level posts. The result is a more traditional flat timeline that should help surface comment activity that happens in old threads. (Note that this option is currently a bit unintuitively one of the modes under "Sort posts".)

New Actions

The Actions subsection on the post page started getting a little long, so I've split off the infrequently needed actions and moved them onto a separate page that can be accessed via a "More..." link.

A couple of new actions were added:

The "Remind me" action sends you a notification about a post or comment. This is intended as a simple utility in case you later want to reply or otherwise take action on something. No delay can be set on the reminder; it arrives immediately.
The "Report" action sends a notification to the relevant subspace moderators and also the site administrator. This is a private way to bring attention to a post or comment when you feel there has been a violation of the Code of Conduct. At least for the time being one is not able to attach any explanations or messages to the report. (There are no private messages in Bubble.)
Multiple Antenna instances can be defined in the Bubble configuration and a separate Submit action appears for each one.

Composer Improvements

One can disable the featured link of a post. Normally, the first link segment of a post is promoted to a featured link that is shown in Bubble feeds. However, with some posts this doesn't really make sense, for example if there are multiple links of equivalent importance.
There is a new setting to automatically split paragraphs into separate text segments. Editing a longer post is often more convenient when there is a single segment per paragraph, because each paragraph is then a single Gemtext source line: it is easier to copy the previous contents into the edit prompt, and you can submit the new contents without having to worry about newlines. (Paragraphs must be separated by one or more empty lines. Single <LF> characters, i.e., hard-wrapped lines, are not considered to be paragraph separators.) Since there is no page for composer settings at the moment, you can find this on the main page of Settings. The feature is disabled by default.
The segment "Move/actions" now include "S" for splitting paragraphs and "M" for merging a text segment with the segment following it.
Tags can be applied on posts during drafting.

Other Changes

In a comment thread, only a single author link is shown per comment. This link opens the comment page where you can find all the relevant user actions for editing, moderation, and other purposes. The author link also includes the comment timestamp so it doesn't potentially get mixed up with the comment content. Previously, comment threads sometimes had "Edit" or "Delete" links following each entry, which made the thread look a bit crowded.
You can mention (and notify) someone using the Reddit-esque `u/username` syntax in addition to `@username`.
In the Dashboard notifications list, items are grouped by post under each subsection. This should clarify the list when there are multiple notifications about a single post.
There is a new "Moderated" notification group where moderators see notifications about their subspaces.
When making a post without the composer, commonly used URIs (gemini, https, etc.) inside the paragraph text are detected and a link segment is created for each. This only occurs if the Gemtext link `=>` syntax is not being used. The purpose of this is to help readers open links when the poster neglected to make the URI an actual link.

#release

Posted in: s/Bubble

🚀 skyjake [mod, sysop]

2023-11-12 · 4 months ago · 👍 aRubes, gemalaya, Nono, byte · 🎉 1

1 Comment

📡 byte · Nov 12 at 11:10:

that's amazing! can't wait to try all those features out, I bet I'll break something by accident haha