Feb 19, 2023
Mastodon thread visualizer in LÖVE

It took me a while to get to this, but here it is.

The layout is extremely jank, but it makes up for it somewhat using keyboard navigation. And you can click on any node to copy its URL.

LÖVE doesn't yet support https. The next version should, but I finally lost patience and temporarily put together a Lua+luasec crawler that invokes LÖVE.

Like my last few apps, this one can be edited live without restarting it.


Hmm, the second point in the alt-text for the second image requires a correction.

> The current implementation definitely has a bug relative to my intent..

The bug isn't in the implementation but in the algorithm itself. It violates the final constraint I'd set for it.

> cousins never overlap columns

Hmm, time to read the literature.


  design constraints:
  - trees only, no graphs or DAGs
  - parents above children
  - a child shares its parent's column exactly only if it's an only child
  - parents can overlap columns with children and more distant descendants
  - siblings never share a column
  - siblings never overlap columns
  - siblings always occupy the same row
  - cousins/aunts/nephews never overlap columns


Ah, it only took a slight tweak. This looks much better.

Medium-sized thread, take 2

Larger thread, take 2

This post is part of my Freewheeling Apps Devlog.

Comments gratefully appreciated. Please send them to me by any method of your choice and I'll include them here.

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