Ice Cubes for Mastodon

This app behaved like a website when you go through timeline. When you open it, the new toots counting number indicates that new toots are loading up (and the account setting shows that a certain number of toots have been cached); but when you scroll down, the app still needs to fetch a new batch of toots every time. When you are in an unstable network environment and the app can't reach the instance server, it will drop all the data that is already cached and loaded, instead a full-screen error message will show up. And when you tap the "try again" button under the error message, if the app has successfully reached the server again, it forces you to go back to the very top of the timeline, and you lose the position you've been reading. You had to scroll and wait for apps to reload every toots you already read. Maybe unstable network is not a problem that occurs to first-world users, but Mastodon is part of fediverse which means instance servers can be anywhere, so I don't think designing data loading strategy completely under the sumptions of every user having the perfect network environment is reasonable. Apps like Toot! and even some PWA frontends are behaving better at this.

This app is good, it’s alive and in constant development. I just brought up the iPad app, and it was totally synced up to date with the phone app. This is what we need in a client! Also, amazing to me, what a good job job the captioning is in describing photos you post. This is a thing on mastodon, to always provide a caption for the visually impaired to be able to know what you have posted. The captioning is SO GOOD that it made me wonder why the visually impaired person wouldn’t have a captioning capability as good. But then I realized it does pause a bit. And also, I can usually improve the caption slightly & make it more human. So. … that’s photos. There is a new thing called hashtag groups. I have no idea how to use it, yet, but look forward to learning. The magnifying glass search icon leads to something called “explore”, but does not seem to let you actually search the timeline. I know that’s on the list, though! Thank you, creator of Ice Cubes App! Much appreciated!!

I have been on Mastodon for about a year now, using different instances with different profiles. And every instance that I have played around them, I have found nothing but positivity, mind blowing creativity, lots of friendly Neurodivergents, and an atmosphere that is upbeat and helpful, unlike the negativity, the intolerance, and the oneupmanship to be found on Eeeeks, formerly known as Twisted, and on Blechbook. I haven’t been on any instances where you experience homophobia, transphobia, racism, ableism, misogyny, Islamophobia, Christian nationalism, extremism of any kind, or just plain undirected hate, unlike the big boys. Your kids can’t even be safe if you make sure they join a good instance with great moderators/administrators. The ones to which I belong do not tolerate hate and negativity of any kind, and the most that show other than PG-rated content automatically use NSFW warnings.