Oh please, not infinite-scroll. If that will be implemented by any theme creators, just be very sure to implement it correctly - put a limit to it.

I have seen sites implementing the idea very wrongly - no limitations and it was very bad. The new Facebook timeline, the new Facebook friend manage page, and GetGlue, are the best examples.

Why infinite scroll is bad, or what mistakes you should avoid:

• Infinite scroll eats browser memory
  
• Which then will eat your PC memory
  
• Then your browser will slow down
  
• Which later will affect and potentially hang-up your system - even Linux! Imagine that!
  
• In case of Facebook, it makes managing friends very hard and close to impossible - I ended up deleting everyone and restarting from scratch all thanks to their wrong implementation of infinite scrolling
  
• Again, if you do not know what you are doing and you do not use your own product, like GetGlue (and I'm tired telling them this), infinite scroll prevents your customers to click any link in your footer. Why? Because infinite scroll keeps pushing your footer down.

Please forgive me if I sound very 'anti' to it because two of the services that I have no choice but to use have developers who doesn't use their own product and fails to listen to their users. Like c'mon, they have out-of-this-world computers in their offices and homes - what do they expect, that their users have the same uber machines like they do?

Bottomline:

• It should be opt-in not opt-out;
  
• There should be a limit just like how Disqus and a few others implemented it "How many pages to load in infinite scrolling?"

Put a limit, I can not stress that enough. Yes, it's no longer "infinite" if you put a limit but that's the reality - it crashes browsers and PCs, even Linux (with a 2GiB RAM).

OK folks, please don't be too upset by these comments. There really is no need to be. I simply want to add my thoughts to this thread for personal reference purposes.

@sasiflo

Diabook is definitely my favorite theme for friendica.

I don't have a favorite theme per se, but I do have a distinct preference for dispy dark. I also switch to other themes occasionally but always wind up switching back because dd works best for me. Sure it's a little buggy, but it's dark & everything I need just works (more or less). And yeah, it isn't as vertically compact as I'd like it to be, but whatever, I can live with that for now.

What do I like & dislike about the other themes I occasionally switch too? Well...

For diabook
● I like the overall look of it, but still would love if it were tweaked in the manner I suggest in the OP.
● I dislike the whole "sea of white" thing because there aren't enough visual cues to break up the monotony of "a bunch of text + thumbnails on an all-white background." I still don't understand why the D* team were so fond of the whole monotony of white thing. But I guess that doesn't matter now 'cause they've gone to the other extreme... with their full-screen pinterest UI look.

For cleanzero
● I like that it's: widescreen, vertically compact, quick-loading, features single click navigation, breaks up the monotony of white with quotation + comment areas that are highlighted in light grey.
● Not much to dislike TBH ('cause this thing is all business). Perhaps the light grey highlighting could be a bit darker? IDK.

For duepuntozero
● See my likes for cleanzero + the comments/quotations highlighting is a bit darker & as a result more distinctive.
● I dislike that it isn't as wide as some other zeros & that it's got those scroll bars within posts/comments. I simply don't understand the need for secondary vertical scroll bars TBH.

For facepark
● I like that this theme is simple (much like the other zeros) & that it showcases the fact that properly highlighting comments/quotations makes for a much more compelling/engaging stream view.
● I dislike that the comment field lacks any formatting/input buttons whatsoever. But I suppose this is an old theme so... well, yeah. And there are those vertical scroll bars again ???

For slack-NS
● I like it's simplicity.
● I dislike the text + thumbnails on a monotonous white background.

For vier
● I like the overall look & feel of this theme (much like I do diabook). In fact, I especially like the 'blueness' of it all.
● I dislike that, once again, there are no formatting/input buttons in the comment field. There's also the whole 'monotony of white' thing happening again. Just a hint of blue/grey highlighting of comments + quotations would work wonders IMHO.

I'm not entirely sure what I want my ideal ~F theme to look like yet. That's why I occasionally switch themes to figure out what I like & dislike about all the current offerings. That's also why I don't have a favorite yet either, although I do have my preferences.

~F's flexibility is something I haven't fully come to terms with yet. There are many aspects to this project that change the way I think about what it's full capabilities might be & how they could/should be applied.

I hadn't even considered the implications of what you see below until it was pointed out to me recently...

Take WordPress. They assume you'll host on WordPress.com, and out of the box, you get a blog, and that's it. They have, for example, RSS readers and a socnet too - but you have to add features for your users. We give everybody the RSS reader and the socnet, and try to add users to the features.

It's not obvious what you should compare Friendica to. Friendica isn't a social network - that's just one of the features. I use email, messaging, and RSS far more than I use the social network. Some of the people at GNUTelephony use it like a blog (though we could still really use a blog-like theme).

Friendica is based on a CMS, so from a coding perspective, WordPress is probably closer than anything.

So you see, ~F isn't like anything I've seen before. In many ways it reminds me of G+. Both projects are doing things I've never seen before. And both projects are changing my understanding of what the possibilities are and/or might be.