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auto-collapse long posts/other vertical space optimizations

one of the first things i've noticed browsing cohost is that you have to do a lot of scrolling. not only because posts can be very long but because there's a ton of vertical padding between posts, line spacing is very wide, portrait-oriented images automatically scale to fill the width of the timeline, etc.


if there's a long post i'm not interested in and they didn't include a read more, there's no choice but to scroll and scroll and scroll past it, and any post with a vertical image automatically takes up more than a full page. for me this is a problem both from a time/annoyance perspective and somewhat of an accessibility perspective, as excessive scrolling is hard on my wrists.


the most big and impactful solution would be to automatically collapse or insert a read-more point into posts above a certain vertical length, like xkit's "shorten posts" feature.


there are a number of other options that might be added as well to customize the site's layout and use vertical space more effectively, which would help in regards to both user preference and accessibility. examples:

  • a "condensed mode" that reduces the padding space between posts, makes the header and footer portions smaller, reduces line spacing, etc
  • a "wide mode" that utilizes more of the horizontal space on the site for posts
  • an option to change default font size in posts (helpful for visual accessibility as well as people could increase font size to read more easily)
  • an option to cap the maximum vertical height that images are displayed at in the timeline


maybe some of these would interfere with stuff like CSS formatted posts displaying correctly, i'm not sure, but honestly i would rather at least have the option to change these things even if it means the occasional post looks broken as a result.


sorry if these should be requested separately as individual features, it felt more appropriate to group them together since at the core it's one problem with a number of possible solutions


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realized i didn't specify this in the original post, but auto-collapse is something that i also think would be better as a customizable option, i don't think it needs to be default or forced on for everyone


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tumblr does this and I would generally be in favour of a feature like this, but I do want to point out that there are other ways to solve this problem. for example, once they implement hotkeys I imagine this will be much less of an issue on desktop, since you will hopefully be able to just hit a button to scroll past posts

worth noting there is already automatic post collapsing, but it nearly never happens on large screens; the post has to be twice the height of your viewport (as of page load) to get a read more link added


i would personally vote for it to change to somewhere closer to 1x the viewport height


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I just ran into [this post](https://cohost.org/Mani-Kanina/post/2786279-hat-world-new-testa) on my timeline, which, on my mobile device, is SIXTEEN pages long before the *more* button shows up. I only need like one image or 8-12 lines of normal-sized text before I decide whether I want to read more, this is a little excessive.
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