Feed builder: "Input" blocks should NOT default to "Entire Network", it makes things break

[mcclure]

So, I have a feed I made with Skyfeed. It consists of a pattern match on my own posts, plus a handful of posts I added manually.

So, say I want to add a new post manually. My feed looks like this:

I click "Add Block". I choose "Input"—

Yikes! Because Input defaults to "entire feed", the whole network feed has to load. This basically wipes out the existing feed content. I then select the dropdown and switch to "Single Post". I see—

My poor custom PDS (running up to date software) seems to have freaked out when we added the entire network to the feed. :( I speculate having to load the entire network beat it up kinda.

At this point the Skyfeed app is "softlocked". I have seen this failure happen repeatedly with an error message similar to this. Sometimes pasting a new at:// into the new block causes the feed on the right to come back, sometimes it does not. In this state I have added entire blocks, then reloaded the page and found my new blocks deleted.

Expected Behavior

You should do at least one of the following:

• The "Input" block should default to "Single post" not "Entire network", or
• The "Input" block should default to a "None" type, and/or
• The "Input" "Single Post" block should allow inputting a list of URLs (comma separated?) so I wouldn't have to be creating so many different blocks to begin with.

In addition:

• The error reporting could be improved. The "Error 502" is not as helpful as it could be— I assume this error is being generated on my PDS, but your code could add an explanatory note saying a failure is happening on the PDS side. When Skyfeed is failing to make changes, it should detect this and warn the user that their changes are not be being saved.

[mcclure]

Note: With more testing, it looks like the "Error trying to load feed: 502" problem may be because (of course; I just added it) the single post block text entry field is blank. In some tests, pasting in a valid URL causes the feed to come back. But I think there may be more than one error; a recoverable one caused by the blank text entry field, and an unrecoverable error of I don't know what cause. In any case, the fact the entire feed gets temporarily wiped away by "Entire Network" when I add a new block is confusing, and makes problems like this much harder to diagnose.