A proposal to better utilise feeds, purely in-app #1026
Description
This is a muti part suggestion, but it builds a bit. The general idea is to inject feed posts from liked feeds into the main feed at 'regular' intervals, highlighted as 'from feed X'. As a second step, reposts and quote-posts should be handled a little differently from feed pages such that embeds take you to the feed, with that post highlighted, and not to the post itself.
This is three separate ideas, but pulls things together into something coherent.
The app should keep a user's liked feeds up-to-date in the background on a regular interval, and keep a shuffled (once) list of all the liked feeds (the feed list).
1. Feed 'injection'
At regular time intervals (not real time, but based on the times of posts above and below - maybe 15m?), the app should go to the next feed in the feed list, and get the top post. This post should be injected into the user's timeline at that point (regardless of post timestamp), with UI (such as colours, labels, etc.) to indicate that a) it came from a feed and, b) which feed it came from. The app should keep a list of 'injected' posts, and not repeat (even if the same post appears in a diff feed - either show that it is from multiple feeds, or just don't show when it next appears as a candidate).
Let people turn this off like they can with replies.
This gives utility to likes and lets people have a mix of tabbed feeds and liked feeds. This will also encourage people to unfavourite feeds they don't like, making the Discover Feeds page more dynamic.
2. Feed URLs
A special URL scheme is needed of the form &feedLocation=. When following a URL of that form, the user should be taken to the Feed, with that post highlighted. If the post is not in the top few items, it should be injected at the top of the list. The post should be highlighted somehow, but otherwise the user is now on the feed page, viewing the post.
Alternately, the URL should take the user to the post, but have the feed details at the top (i.e. the header as if you navigated to the feed directly).
3. Reposts and Quotes
This is the part that enables cross-promotion - when a user reposts an item from a feed (that was either injected, or from the feed page), it should instead be an automatic quote post with the item embedded with the special URL above. The quote text should be automatic (or blank).
When quote-posting, the feed URL above is used. In this manner, users will see which feeds their friends are using, and this will bring more eyes onto feeds they may want to subscribe to.