There should be a way to never show old posts in Home/Local/All feeds

[dhashe]

Thank you for developing Voyager. It has been a joy to use.

I try to practice "Inbox Zero" with my digital media consumption, where I have a finite list of items to read and then I am done.

I am using the "Auto Hide Read Posts" and "Mark Read on Scroll" features of Voyager so that I don't see the same content repeatedly. I mostly use the "Home" feed, so that I only see posts from communities that I am subscribed to.

What happens is that Voyager will end up showing increasingly older and older posts over time. All of the new posts are marked as read, so it goes back in time to find the newest unread posts, which can be weeks or months old.

Every time I refresh the feed, both the new posts and the newest old posts are marked as read, so I get new new posts (going forwards in time) and newly revealed old posts (going backwards in time).

This can take some time to render. Because Voyager will show a message like "Load Page 8" at the bottom of the first page, I suspect that the slowness might be because Voyager is loading all content in reverse chronological order until it finds enough to fill the page, but that is a guess.

My preferred behavior would be to not show these old posts. Other programs will sometimes show a message like "all caught up" or "nothing to show" when the user has exhausted all new content.

I think that this would address my use case:

Add a toggle in the settings to not show posts in the Home/Local/All feeds that are older than one week or one month. The cutoff is arbitrary, but either of those seem reasonable to me. I don't think it is worth making the cutoff user-configurable. Maybe one month would be better because it is more conservative and would better-serve occasional users with few subscriptions.

As an alternative solution, it might be better to include a page break between content less than one month old and more than one month old. Then, the user has the option to click through to load the next page containing old content if they wish. The upside of this solution is that it does not require the user to configure anything, and so it would benefit more users. The downside of this solution is that I suspect it would be more difficult to implement.

What do you think?

[dhashe]

For clarity, here is a screenshot of the behavior that I currently see, where there are both new posts and old posts on the Home feed.

[aeharding]

Hi! I think I have good news for you. Lemmy v1 will add the concept of time_range_seconds to limit (mainly for Top and Controversial sorts) but it could also be used to cap post age regardless.

Would have to wait for lemmy v1 to be minimum instance support on Voyager, which may be 6+ months out however given the large number of changes.

[dhashe]

Wonderful! I think that I agree that time_range_seconds will address my use case.

Specifically, I think that post-v1 I will be able to set default_post_time_range_seconds on my user settings for my local instance to a custom value and that will naturally cause Voyager to retrieve only posts less than that age in the Home/Local/All feeds.

Please feel free to either close this if no work is planned, or keep it open if it is useful for tracking purposes.