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Feature Request: Flag New Comments
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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This was something I requested ages ago, however, unless it has been added since, there is nothing in the api for this. I have been meaning to add a feature request to piefed for the feature with api support. @wsj018@piefed.social
@blaze@piefed.zip has been asking for this feature for ages and @Skavau@piefed.social made an issue for it on the codeberg already. The reason this isn't in the api yet is because it isn't anywhere in piefed yet. AFAIK, the read/unread status of comments isn't currently tracked anywhere within piefed. Additionally, for this feature, I don't believe we track the timestamp at which you do interact with a post...so doing something like calculating the number of new comments that have occurred since you last opened that post isn't possible...yet.
I don't have a great idea of how to do this in a db-efficient way. Keeping track of when every user opens each post sounds like db-query hell. However, there might be clever caching tricks to make it a bit less computationally intense. @rimu@piefed.social would likely have a better idea of how to do this.
Thanks for the info :) Lemmy 1.0 tracks a
readAttimestamp; maybe it's worth looking at how they're doing it.Can't you track which posts (and when) people view locally, in your app? Then when displaying comments compare the comment time with the last-viewed-post time to determine if it's new.
@wjs018@piefed.social
We could do, but ideally it would be implemented on the backend - some people use PieFed on both mobile and desktop, and storing the last read count locally wouldn't carry over properly between clients. Lemmy 1.0 has backend support for this feature.
I'd like to survey our users on this to see how they feel about what they read being tracked in this way.
Some time ago I floated the idea of somehow highlighting/prioritizing comments by people who had clicked the link to the article. People who mouth off without reading the article are a pain in the ass so I wanted to somehow de-emphasize those. The feedback I got at the time was pretty strongly "no I don't want you knowing what I read". It's too easy to do big data stuff on it to build profiles on people, I guess. It wasn't a proper poll, just people commenting so it's hard to know what the silent majority thinks.
So I'm a bit wary about it now.
Any suggestions for how to word the survey question? How it's framed will make a big difference to the result.
If there was a
readAtdate for the post, we'd be able to highlight comments created since that date. I don't think tracking areadAtdate is much less private than tracking areadboolean, which you're already doing. It could always be made opt-out, if people are concerned about it. Having the date that someone read a post isn't as exploitable as the link click tracking you mention, I don't think.