Also "classics" is just the subscribed podcasts without any order and name (it's just a picture and some podcasts don't include any or any meaningful picture at all).

TLDR: Podcast App added a feature as useful as the home screen of an Samsung TV :/

Hi @gom, thanks for the extensive feedback. Let's look at each of your points.

> the KPI of "time of active interaction by customer" is targeted

That was most certainly not the reason our volunteer team initiated this work. The motivation was a) results from user tests indicating it was confusing not to have a central start screen & b) interest of active contributors to navigate the app without any menu. Have a look here to see the discussions: github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaP… & forum.antennapod.org/t/home-sc…

@gom
> Queue shows 2.6 items unless scrolled sideways. 2.6 is too much for just returning to the last episodes played

Why is it too much? (We could display just 1 episode and leave whitespace, but that's not really helpful either.)
The purpose, as explained in our blog post (antennapod.org/blog/2023/05/in…), is to allow users to continue listening to episodes they started but didn't finish yet. These episodes may be spread over the queue, making this compact overview handy for this specific purpose.

@gom
> the last active episode is available at the bottom player overlay. Therefore one item of the 2.6 displayed Queue is redundant.

We have been struggling with this also. The problem: when you press play on an item it would disappear from that row, because it's already in the mini-player. This can lead to unexpected behaviour with episodes dis-/reappearing. See also enhancement request and discussion here: github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaP… (feel free to suggest other solutions).

@gom
> Next is "what's new", 2 items shown, which most of the times is way less than items available

Including the full list would go against the purpose of the Home screen (providing an overview & quick entry points to several screens). Including many very long lists would make the Home screen hard to use. It's a balance we have to strike. Concrete suggestions for tweaking the balance welcome!

@gom
> new downloads should be automated any ways

Remember that this is not the case for everyone: it's a user setting, so it depends on your context.

> If one side scrolls on "what's new" like on Queue, Download items become dismissed.

That can happen indeed. The different patterns stem from their 'parent' screens: inbox has swipe actions that we want to maintain. In other blocks we wanted to give more visual visibility to the episode covers. We trust it's a matter of getting used to.

@gom
> On "Get surprised" it looks like the "Queue" block, but is not scrollable at all, but "classics" is.

It actually is scrollable like the Queue block. Maybe you don't have a large backlog of episodes, and only the few qualifying ones are shown.

@gom
> Also "classics" is just the subscribed podcasts without any order and name (it's just a picture and some podcasts don't include any or any meaningful picture at all).

There is an order actually, based on hours of listening. While some podcasts might not include a meaningful image, that really is a minority. In a large majority of cases displaying a title would be superfluous.

@gom
> TLDR: Podcast App added a feature as useful as the home screen of an Samsung TV :/

This feature has been under active discussion & development for over two years. Many people were involved and gave feedback. But of course it's possible it's not for you. In that case you can, as with many other things in AntennaPod, adjust it to your liking and turn off the Home screen. Simply long-press the side-menu and disable the Home screen. Via the settings you can also change your 'Default page'.

Thanks a lot for the answers!

TIL: Long pressing to change default start screen. This App is love! :)

it could be a few different things. What we've added/adding for Mastodon is a "Share to Mastodon" button ( see an example at kraft.blog/2023/02/joining-the… ) and we're adding support for our auto-post function where when you publish a blog post, an excerpt, some media, and a link is published on your socials.

For Twitter, we also had things like tweetswarming where we'd suck in a thread and import it into a new post for those who did huge Twitter threads and realized it should be on their site. Also, had the reverse. Write a post and have it auto-posted as a Twitter thread with sensible breakpoints.

Those latter two were really because of the char count limits of Twitter which I don't think would apply to the Fediverse platforms I've checked out so far.

Have you considered, instead of sharing the blog post to mastodon, making the entire blog subscrible as part of the fediverse?

Like a "Follow" and a "reblog" buttons instead of a "share" button.

@matthieu_xyz@liaizon@social.wake.st yes! That's in the works too. We brought on board the gentleman who created wordpress.org/plugins/activity… to bring ActivityPub support to WordPress sites.

He's working now on integrating it for all WordPress.com sites and making it a better experience.

Right now, it isn't feature-complete enough for me, personally, to say it's ready for folks who aren't early adopters and okay with rough edges.

The sharing and auto-posting is a bit easier to do since there is the existing model of doing it on legacy social media platforms.

On the Tumblr side of the company, same thing. Want to get it to be ActivityPub-compliant. I don't work over there but I imagine that's a pretty big effort and I don't know where it stands off hand.

Long answer but yes. Having a site published using the ActivityPub protocol is on the horizon.