I'm surprised to see the iOS app ship without a local/federated stream. The local stream especially seems central to the communities that are built with mastodon.
Yeah, this seems like trying to drive your users into a paradigm that is contrary to how people are actually using it. The central problem with any social network is discoverability, which is hard on a decentralized platform. For me, the process is/was finding an instance that was congruent to my interests, and the only way to determine that is by watching the instance timeline.
I'm admin for a small Mastodon server, and I'm kind of depressed that the official app is simply not going to support my local feed, that any feedback about this is ignored. The local feed is the main motivation to run a small Mastodon instance. I understand that it's useless to a huge server like the flagship instance, but I thought the point of the fediverse is to not simply run everything on a handful of huge websites.
Interesting thoughts from gargron. I can understand the desire to reduce confusion for end users even if I don't agree with the decision. I think the issue is with communicating what the local feee is. In my personal opinion the federated timeline is close to useless near instantly, but local is not.
Perhaps there really is no way to rebrand "local" to something users understand, but that feels a bit defeatist.
I think I would be more... ok with his statement if it was not the official app? If it was gargron's mastodon app, not "the" mastodon app. One represents the community, one represents his specific vision. But then again he is the majority driver of this product. But to not support large features of the main product in the flagship mobile app feels like a setback. _shrug_ sadly I don't use the product much anymore regardless so this is all just mental spewing at this point.
I'm terrible at reading usernames so didn't even realize it was you responding!
I read and reacted a bit to your thoughts on the previous GitHub issue around local feed in the app when someone posted it below. I can see the reasoning, even if I don't necessarily agree/it wasn't my use case.
Good luck with the project! I'm impressed with it regardless.