Social Feeds and Email.

I believe I’ve said before that I’d prefer if social feeds on sites like Mastodon instances and others worked like email. Email has its own downsides, but it also has benefits. The email clients I’ve used show you a listing of mails, and let you control their destinies, whether marking them as spam, as read, deleting, foldering. Emails have subject lines that perhaps give you information about their contents, perhaps not. You can see the sender and recipient.

Social feeds aren’t sent to you by the author. They’re sent to followers, possibly forwarded by boosting, possibly quoted verbatim in quote-posts. So there’s some differences in the type of messages, how they move through the system.

The main reason I’d like to see social feed interfaces move toward something more like email is self-curation. At present, it can be difficult to prioritize some posts over others. It’s a big hose of noise for you to dig out the signal from. That’s true even if you use keyword filters or lists to group like-posters together.

With an email system (including subject lines), you could more easily browse the new content and get to the ones that matter first, while taking your time on the others, and while ignoring those that don’t apply to you. You get a bite-sized overview of all the content in your inbox, and you decide how you want to wade through it all.

Another key benefit would be situations where you see the same posts again and again, usually due to boosting, but sometimes from quote-posts. With something more like email, you could mark all related posts as read or ignore the threads that erupt from the initial posts.

I don’t honestly know if I want an email interface for social, but I definitely want something other than the current crop of interfaces, which are based on what Twitter ended up with over a decade ago. We could do better, I’m sure, but the two follow-based social systems I regularly use (Mastodon and Bluesky) both basically clone Twitter without adding much or offering greater ability to manage the stream of posts.

And I’m not in love with email clients, by any means. I have never been a heavy user of email. But the basic ability to pick what you view in email has never been a problem. You see the messages, you choose what to read. On social feeds, it just spews them either chronologically or on some sorting algorithm, but in neither case are you given any kind of overview. You could be reading about a dozen different topics all mixed together while scrolling through 50 posts.

I believe I’ve also said before, that social feeds don’t feel like they’re built for professional use. They feel like they want to be fun. But that comes with the expense of making them much less useful than they could be.

At some point, the fact that social media protocols are really just a bag of APIs might allow better third-party interfaces, but I haven’t seen much that way. What I have seen are third-party apps. Part of the problem is hosting. An app gives you the interface ready to go on a mobile, but to achieve that on desktop they have to host a website. We don’t have the ability to download a lump of Javascript and have an API-capable interface on Desktop. They could make a React application, but that’s just nasty.

I like reading what people have to say, but it often comes with a lump of annoyance that it feels none of the systems are working on removing. Ah well. That’s life, I guess.