old "Tweet Marker" functionality

[sarah11918]

Does anyone remember Tweet Marker?

I regularly read Bluesky posts on several different devices, and with several different clients. I am one of those people who likes to "pick up where I left off" and doing so is challenging when you never know which device you'll pick up next.

The Android client Skywalker ( https://bsky.app/profile/skywalker.thereforeiam.eu ) holds the last position in your following timeline, and displays how many unread posts there are, when you re-open the app.

Another Android Bluesky client ZonePane I have used for Mastodon for over a year, and used their identical Twitter client for several years has an extremely sophisticated "last updated"/"referesh and hold your position in your timeline" system.

Therefore, it is possible for individual posts to have a read/unread status. I don't know what's going on behind the scenes, whether these apps are looking for the "last read/first unread" post, or whether they are setting a special property of "start here!" on a post. But both of these apps are able to hold status within the app itself. (Zone pane can do it for any column: lists, searches, feeds... Skywalker currently only does it for Follows). No web client yet does this. (Elk never did this.) This would be a great start, and would serve someone who only ever consumed Bluesky in one single client.

In fact, the old TweetDeck (at least, Better TweetDeck) was able to do this between sessions for Twitter. If you "cleared" a column as read, it didn't matter which device/browser you picked up again, the status was kept consistent no matter which browser/tab/device you used. This is closer achieving portability, and may in fact be a good goal for a single web client. It's perfectly reasonable to build "for Nimbus" and whether you're on your laptop, your desktop, or a PWA/mobile browser, your status is synced. That would be amazing!

I think the ultimate stretch goal, that would encourage other apps to do the same, would be a more universal "TweetMarker" functionality. That way, on your computer, use Nimbus. When you want an app on your phone, if you're using one that has TweetMarker, then you can include Nimbus as your desktop client while still using a preferred mobile app when you're on your phone. I can tell you, the current desktop client I use right now is the only one that lets me choose absolute timestamps in the timeline vs relative time. And this is because I make a note of the time I last caught up, so that however I choose to go back to reading, I know what time to scroll back to. I am using a browser option that doesn't have some features I want simply because it gives me a reliable way of knowing where I left off. (It's not even a particularly good/high tech one, but it exists.)

So, the old BetterTweetDeck model is one way to achieve this within Nimbus itself. TweetMarker functionality would foster cross-client use, which I think is pretty darn cool.