Today I put together a little visualizer for Mastodon threads. The graph layout is nothing special, but: • it has structured keyboard shortcuts (up for parent, down for child, left/right for siblings) which might be more useful for understanding a complex thread • as always you can live-edit it so it's hopefully easy to improve One other little integration: opening links in browsers opens up all sorts of cross-platform cans of worms, so I ended up just copying a URL to the clipboard any time you click on a toot. https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/mastodon-unfurl.love

From a malleable systems point of view, the best strategy for the link question would be to let users supply their own function for it, and document how to do that.

Nice to see some UI experimentation here. It's a bit disappointing that most Mastodon clients just look like Twitter.

Since I built this, my thoughts have been running in the direction of turning it into a full graph editor. However, all the graphs I want to create also have other constraints. Sometimes I want a sort of activity diagram (https://plantuml.com/activity-diagram-beta), other times I want some edges always be horizontal and to line up with similar edges. I've also been thinking about the clunky drawing primitives I chose in http://akkartik.name/lines.html. Writing text inside shapes doesn't really work, which is like literally the first thing one might want to do with line drawings. Putting these thoughts together, I've been imagining a 2-level tool with a tray on the left like in Recursive Drawing or Crosscut, where I can draw some primitives into the tool tray and then attach hotkeys to them to compose them into pictures in the main area.

Thanks for sharing these thoughts! I really need to take a closer look at some of these examples you reference like Recursive Drawing 👀 Also I'm curious what you mean by "writing text inside shapes doesn't really work"? In what way?

Check out @Ivan Reese's https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex, it's my go-to reference for past projects.