I have a long standing problem that probably has several good solutions, I just haven't been able to figure them out. So here I am, asking you.

I'm selfhosting some services, a mix of selfbuilt and open source software. But some things I don't want to selfhost. Notably backups and alerts/notifications. For backups I have a solution which works well in every regard except one - I don't always get alerted when things fail, because the way I send myself those alerts is failing more than the actual backups.

Currently I'm using python and gmails smtp interface to send myself email, but gmail disables my smtp access from time to time, and it's really easy not to notice not getting an email. I've tried sending the email regardless of whether the backup failed or not, but I've noticed several times that I still don't notice if the they stop coming.

Now on to my requirements/wishlist.

1. I'm already using s3 glacier at aws for the backups, so preferrably something in the aws space.
2. I would like to get an popup/toast on my phone when a message is being sent. And the ability to review messages later.
3. I would like as few moving parts as possible.
4. I don't want to write my own client.
5. I want it to be cheap, and if there's a cost I prefer to pay it at a place where I'm already paying, meaning aws (or possibly proton).
6. I want a stable service.
7. I prefer to manage as little as possible of the infrastructure.
8. I'd like a simple programmable interface that can't easily fail. E.g. http based.
9. It's no problem if messages are not received instantly, I could easily tolerate delays up to 24 hours.

As you may have noticed I'm pretty much expecting there to be something in aws that I can use, but aws documentation is so abstract, that I often don't understand what the point of something is or how I'm supposed to use it.

Building my first Progressive Web App, it's new territory for me but I've made it installable already.

I'm trying to cover a fairly simple use case, which is displaying a badge count based on the number of unread notifications. Intuition tells me that I'd just ping an endpoint on the server at a 5 minute interval, but I'm in new territory so I thought I'd open up the conversation to see if there's any gotchas to be aware of.

I'd like to see if there's anyone out there on Tildes who has experience in this domain - is the service-worker always on, or is it only active once the app has been open and then backgrounded? How do I know if the app is currently open? I would like the app to query for notifications more frequently when it's opened, and only intermittently when it's closed. Any tips?

This is a thought I've been having a lot lately. It seems like 90% of notifications I get these days both on my phone and computer are ads begging me to either: upgrade a service I already have ("you're running out of space on [insert cloud service here] at 75% usage will you please UPGRADE?") or re-engage with an app that hasn't sucked enough of my attention ("we MISS you! PLEASE engage!"), with the remaining tiny minority being useful actionable information. I've noticed too that social media notifications NEVER give you enough detail about something that's going on to not have to open the app directly. It's kind of exhausting to the point where I've disabled most notifications on my devices altogether. I don't really know the point of this post other than to commiserate and to simply open it up for discussion. Thoughts?

EDIT: WOW this blew up! Thanks everyone for your contributions!

Has anyone else noticed that sometimes the Tildes homepage will say "1 new message", but when clicking on this the message inbox is empty?

I guess this is because messages are being deleted after being sent? It's slightly annoying because I can't find a way to dismiss the "new message" notification.

I haven’t touched reddit since the APIcalyspe. I’m planning to delete my account but haven’t gotten around to it yet. I was a heavy Apollo user on iOS but never subscribed to it for its push notification service, instead I kept the official reddit app installed and the only thing I used it for were its notifications. I still have both apps installed.

Anyway, I was surprised to see one pop up yesterday, especially since it wasn’t connected to my user activity (a new private message or reply to an old comment of mine or something). The notification was just an ad. More specifically, it was promoting some trending post on the site that had “>12,000 upvotes.” In many many years of having the app installed I’ve never seen that before. Is it new?

Reddit’s had a mildly antagonist relationship with its users for ages, but it feels like they are REALLY intensifying things now. I’m glad I got off the train when I did. And sorry for making yet another post about reddit, I think we’re all getting tired of harping on it here.

I really like how Tildes encourages meaningful discussions and discourages "useless" noise.
But it leads to occasionally awkward situations where for example I ask a clarification question or whatever, get a wonderful reply that answers everything I'd like, but leaves me in a situation where I have nothing meaningful left to add to the conversation, yet still wanting to personally thank the other person for their reply.
Obviously I place my vote on the reply, but it still feels like i sort of ghost the other person. I'd like them to know that I appreciate their reply.

My suggestion would be a kind of "Thank you" function or tag that would be available exclusively to replies to ones comments, signifying ones personal gratitude (man, that sounds pretentious, but I can't think of a better way to phrase it. I'll just blame the fact that English isn't my native language...), maybe coupled with an automatic vote.
The receiver of a "Thank you" could then get a small one-time notification in their inbox.
The comment in question could theoretically also display the "thank you" status to the author, maybe after the vote count at the beginning like this: "10 votes and a thank you from Landhund"

What do you think?

Getting a reply to your comment or post on Reddit was always a double-edged sword, it could be a helpful reply or just someone saying "THIS." or commenting on your punctuation. On Tildes I feel much more certain that it's a well thought out reply every time I press the red link.

Thanks for being a great community and thanks to @Deimos for keeping the place civilized.

Apologies if this isn’t the right place to put bug reports.

I’ve noticed an issue where comments which are bookmarked don’t display as such in my notifications.

For example:

A bookmarked comment displaying as Unbookmarked in my notifications.

Is anyone else seeing the same ?

I didn't see it in feature requests or planned features. Has there been discussion on this before?

For the most part, I want to receive notifications of replies to my topics. But recently I made a topic that took off a bit and many days later there are replies still dropping through. At this point I would prefer to stop getting notifications and or would be great to have a button on the topic to disable replies most for that one.

When I get comment reply notifications, I normally prefer to read them in context of my own reply, and potentially other replies. However when I do this, the notification doesn't go away on its own, so I have to return to the page to click "mark as read".

I know I can also mark the notification as read by voting on or replying to the reply, but I often don't do that. Yet I always seem to want to view the comment in its context, which requires me to leave the notifications page. In this specific use case there is no convenient way to mark the notification as read without going back.

To avoid the extra page load, I would like the notification being marked as read when the link to it is opened, to be an option. (Actually, I'd like it to be the default behaviour, but since the current default behaviour is to not mark comments as read until an explicit action is taken on them, I suppose I'm in the minority. An option is just fine.)

I have a UX pain point: From the notifications / new comments (replies) page, if I mark all notifications as read, all the nice, handy links to the threads go poof on the page refresh. So now, I have to manually hunt down all/any of them to return to the OPs and revisit the broader discussions.

Can we make the "mark all read" link do its job without clearing the page? I realize this will probably make things more complicated (a notif that is already seen/read is being displayed on the "unread notifs" page, so how will that work, UI- and UX-wise), but... this is just a pain point that I hit again and again. I thought I could tolerate it (which is why I haven't said anything till now), but it's an issue for me nearly every single time.

I often come across a topic that I find somewhat interesting, but end up being much more interested in a discussion happening within that topic. I think it would be useful to be able to "watch" a comment/thread to be notified if someone replies to a comment. Thoughts?

One thing we take for granted in social media is that any comment may receive a reply from anyone. Maybe we should rethink that? What would happen if it were optional?
For example, for someone posting in "What's a widely criticized thing that you feel is worth defending?" topic, I am not sure that everyone posting there really wanted to start a discussion.
Having replies shut off might be frustrating sometimes as a reader, particularly when something you disagree with gets a lot of upvotes. But it would make the author's intent clearer. If you're inviting further conversation, leave replies on. If you're not, turn it off.
Everyone has the right to walk away from conversation. This would make it explicit. Maybe it would make heated threads less likely, since they'd stop sooner? It seems like it's more difficult to walk away when you're also letting the other side get the last word?

Some people only include footnotes on their text after they finish it, or realize that their interpretation of something might not be the same as others interpretation (like what is social media) or source their claims, or detail it after finishing the main body. Admittedly we might want to let the user choose whether their edit is worth notifying to all who replied for the sake of stuff like typos though.

If a top-level comment is collapsed by default (presumably due to "noise" tags), replies to that comment will still trigger the "1 new" text on the topic, but won't be visible when you visit the thread - and there's not even any indication that you should expand the noise-tagged comment to see a reply.

Would it be possible(/desirable) to show the red indicator next to collapsed comments if there's a new comment underneath them?

I suggest that if a user other than the topic submitter makes a change to the topic that is reflected in the Topic Log (e.g., tag/title/group change), then the topic submitter receives a notification.

This may or may not apply to topic deletion and/or topic locking—to be discussed.

While browsing through the Tildes documentation, I stumbled across this in the Technical Goals section:

Tildes is a website. Your phone already has an app for using it—it's your browser.

Tildes will have a full-featured API, so I definitely don't want to discourage mobile apps overall, but the primary interface for using the site on mobile should remain as the website. That means that mobile users will get access to updates at exactly the same time as desktop ones, and full functionality should always be available on both.

This got me thinking. Despite Tildes preferring mobile browsers over an app, is there still a chance for one? I usually avoid using websites on mobile unless I must, as mobile websites generally don't have the full functionality of the website. Labelling comments 'Exemplary' and 'Malice' on mobile is an example of what doesn't work (there's more), and it's usually very unresponsive for some of the things that still do work. Also, there aren't any notifications on mobile websites and some people, me included, have cumbersome browsers that make the feel of using the website slow and laborious.

Another thing is, if the app has no chance of happening, could Tildes get desktop notifications? I usually like to respond to replies to my topics and comments as quickly as possible and I'm not a fan of the whole 'constant login to check my notifications' thing. Email notifications aren't possible because of Tildes' privacy belief.

I have the "mark new comments" option enabled. Most of the time, it works, displaying "(X new)" under any topics which have had new comments posted since I last looked at it.

However, if the topic is old enough, this "(X new)" notification does not display. The topic is sorted to the top of my feed, because I'm using activity from all-time as my default sort. But it doesn't show "(X new)". I know it has new comments, or it wouldn't jump to the top of my feed, but I'm not seeing that notification.

I don't know how old is "old enough" but it's definitely longer than a month. The topics this is happening to are 3 or 6 months old, but it doesn't seem to happen for topics which are only a few weeks old.

Not sure if this has already been suggested, but can we get an ability to add ourselves to a post as a "listener" so that we get notifications similar to "N new reply"? For cases where we're interested in following the discussion, but may not have anything to add, or just interested in someone else's thread in the discussion.

Over on ~creative, the idea of a regular photo challenge came up, which I think is a great idea and I'm looking forward to having a go at. But I'm notoriously bad at remembering to keep track of stuff like that.

What might be useful to help solve that problem would be the ability to subscribe with notifications. So I can get a notification - perhaps in 'unread', perhaps in a separate area - when a post is made with the tag creative.photochallenge.annouce or in the group ~creative.photochallenge, meaning I don't forget about that week's challenge announcement.

This could be useful for other things you want to keep track of: music.newreleases or hobbies.geocaching or whatever particular thing you're slightly more interested in than just being subscribed to it.

Automatically* dammit auto-correct!

I often use the notifications to reply to comments directly, opening the context link in another tab if needed. I after replying I have to explicitly 'Mark as read'. I think it makes sense to automatically mark a notification as read when replying to it.

If this is a common use I will happily create an issue for it on GitLab.

I was just thinking about something that I've noticed being an issue in a few cases on reddit. If you accidentally post something that's wrong or misleading, you might decide to edit the comment/post to be more accurate, once something was pointed out to you.

But lets say that you posted some tidbit like "David Firth is demonetized from youtube.. god i hate youtubes recent trend", which was along the lines of the things I'm talking about. But then weren't fully up to date on the story anymore as Firth had been re-instated.

With the post getting 90% of its upvotes before the "e: he's reinstated now", it's rife for accidental victimless misinformation. And once you make the correction (let's not make it 100%), you cant really go pm'ing everyone because that's annoying, and not everyone that saw it commented on it.

I'm not actually sure how much of an issue anyone else thinks this is so I'd be glad to hear if you've got a perspective on it.

The best thing I can think of is to give a little notification to people who have interacted with the post (or viewed it in the last certain amount of time?) so that you can evaluate the comment again. This isn't ideal because you'll be clued into everyone's spelling corrections.

A friend suggested a edit "pull request" thing where anyone could propose an edit, and then empowered users could approve the changes. Perhaps, if this is actually an issue and not just an over-caution, this could be rolled into that. If an empowered user thinks that it's worth pinging everyone that interacted with that post directly (vote/tag/comment) once the edit is pushed.

On Reddit, the reply notifications come with a "context" button, which will bring you to the topic and show a limited set of replies, to establish the context in which the new comment was made. From what I can see, there's no such feature on Tildes (yet). I'd like it if we could get a feature like that so I can easily read back what someone replied to, so I can understand the context behind it, and possibly reply again.

I noticed when opening my notifications that they are missing a link to the originating thread.

EDIT: just discovered that the # at the end of the header line is a link back to the topic. Maybe making that a bit more obvious then?

Hello,

https://tildes.net/notifications/unread shows only the unread notifications.

If I have marked all comment replies are read, that link will show me an empty page.

So I thought that visiting https://tildes.net/notifications/ should show me all the past replies to my comments, but that's returning 404.

So, is there a place where I can see all the read notifications/replies?