QOTO.org new January 2020 Features Added - 6 - Quick View Remote Timeline.

This is something I have just discovered, as I prepared screenshots for a previous post.

It is similar to the "Domain Subscriptions" feature listed previously. But :

- It can be done from ANY post, and allows you to instantly open a column showing the originating Instance's Local Timeline.

- Done taking a look? Just back out of it, open any other timeline and move on.

If you liked what you see in their timeline, then you could consider Domain Subscribing as described at discourse.qoto.org/t/qoto-org- .

* Why would someone be interested in that?

- for diversity : the fediverse has a myriad of instances, and that means there's many different places. Some are big, some are small, many we can't even read the local languages, but it's fun to travel and see.

- when things get quiet at Qoto's local timeline... we open one of these and have freshly posted content from whichever instance we selected.

Isn't this snooping, or uncool, or frowned upon? No, not at all.

- we can only see posts that were made Public at their original instance.

- these posts will be Federated and will join the millions of others in the Home and Federated feeds.

* How do we open this Quick View into a Remote Instance ?

Reminding everyone that this feature is now available here at Qoto.org, and it will not work elsewhere (unless the instance installed similar modified software).

But, I was really surprised on finding it here too - even @freemo hasn't mentioned it, and likely is unware this is now possible.

- From ANY post in the Home or Federated feeds, click on the "..." Dots menu in their lower part.

- There are various options, some quite useful for controlling unwanted content (mute, report, etc.)

- And on this list we now find "*Open instance.name timeline*". (see screenshot #1)

- VoilΓ‘.. Click on that, and the screen will display a Full column of the remote instance posts; their Local timeline in fact. (see screenshot #2)

As shown in the screenshot, *we are still on the qoto.org domain*, but the timeline displayed is from ***blob.cat's posts***.

That's it, simple as that!

Like it? See the instructions and Subscribe to their Domain if desired --> discourse.qoto.org/t/qoto-org-

** You can also see this post in prettier, easier to Read format at the Discourse Forum : discourse.qoto.org/t/qoto-org-

** Why, Prettier? Because.. Text formatting, Header sizes, Bold and Italicized text styles, Inline images inserted in the proper place on the text, that's why. πŸ˜›

@freemo This was so surprising to me that I took the time to login into another, non-moderator account, to make sure a regular user could see this feature.

It does work, for any QOTO user account, as shown in the screenshots (taken from my alt, secondary Qoto account).

And it is NOT present in any other instances, where I logged on locally to check if I had so far missed this. Nope, not there. Exclusive. πŸ˜ƒ

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@design_RG You can also pin the timeline if you wish. This works different than the domain subscription but with similar results. The remote timeline itself uses the API to pull up a remote timeline and will exist as its own column. The Domain Subscription will pull in the timeline through the federated feed (thus sometimes have different content) but it allows you to lump different timelines into the same list if you wish.

@freemo Ah, thank you -- this explains the difference in behaviour, the feed accessed via the dots menu (and by the API call) fill up instantly, while the Subscribe Domain method will populate as new posts are made in that instance.

Remote API calls might be blocked in some places (it was being discussed by some admins in regards to the major scraping done by the University researchers recently), while the Federated feed pull will always work.

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@design_RG The effort of admins to prevent their content from being scraped will be futile, so long as they allow their users to publish public posts it wont be possible.

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