Fun stuff when live testing the new /world feed

Last month I teased a new interface for the /world page, a feed-style interface that attempts to straddle the line between microblog content and threaded content.

That interface is actually live on both community.nodebb.org and ActivityPub.space, so it's possible to try them out today.

Since it's a feed, it does take longer to scroll through than a traditional topic listing. So much so that for me, by the time I get to the end of the page, the things that were on page 1 have been bumped down to page 2, and when the new items load (via infinite scroll) or you go to page 2, it contains stuff you've already seen 😅

One way to handle this is to use an after token, whereby you calculate the next set of items relative to the last item on the page.

That actually does work okay, because when you are infinitely paginating, you can actually muck around with the order of items and nobody is the wiser about it (shh 🤫), as long as you don't repeat any items...

But paginating comes with some expectations about these things... and you also have a physical representation of which page you are on.

It certainly would be a little weird if after reading page 1, you hit "next page", and were suddenly on page 4 because of new content!

NodeBB supports both infinite scrolling and pagination, so any solution needs to take into account the needs of both users.