PriorProject

@[email protected]

Just an explorer in the threadiverse.

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PriorProject ,

Josh Wardle, who would later go on to create and then sell Wordle, thought up the idea for r/Place, according to Newsweek

Wat? Apparently this dude keeps bottles of lightning in his desk drawer and just breaks one out whenever he feels like it.

Microblogging Platform with an Algorithm ( kbin.social )

When I tried Mastodon, I found I couldn't get the content I'm interested in there. I'm not really interested in following specific people; instead I want to see posts that fit my interests, regardless of who made them. Hence (apparently very unpopular on the Fediverse), I actually want an algorithm that can create a personalized...

PriorProject ,

As a point of pedantry, “show posts in timestamped order” and “show posts ordered by vote popularity” are both algorithms. Algorithm doesn’t have to mean “mysterious and nefarious Facebook feed magic”. However posts get picked and sorted for your feed, that’s the algorithm… even if it’s as simple as “pick random posts”. You got at a better name at the end of your post which is personalized recommendations. They typically require fairly exotic analysis pipelines that are much more computationally (and consequently financially) expensive to run than feed generation algorithms that are powered by the global/shared sorting criteria that are popular in the Fediverse.

But as others have noted:

  • Mastodon uses a people-focused approach. If you want a topic-focused approach… you found it in Lemmy. Sub to topic-based communities here.
  • Mastodon does have hashtags to represent topics, and those can be subscribed to just like people. Hashtags don’t have moderation teams to keep them on-topic though, so it can be a bit of a grab-bag of content. I find the result inferior to Lemmy, personally.

By curating your list of Lemmy communities or Mastodon hashtags, you can create a topic-oriented feed that caters to your interest. Tag/community discovery takes more work than a recommendation engine that tosses ideas your way autonomously, but also gives you more control. Either way, I don’t think you’ll find systems in the Fediverse that do personalized recommendations. In addition to the ideological opposition to them, they’re very complex and pricey which puts them a bit at-odds with volunteer run/funded infrastructure.

PriorProject ,

Why structure this as a browser extension rather than pull-requests to the Lemmy web-ui? With Reddit, there was no path to contribute an improvement to the web-UI, so an extension was the only viable path to fix anything. By my sense is that the Lemmy core devs have been very receptive to external contributions, and have welcomed improvements from UX/UI experts.

Have you considered trying to adapt this to the Lemmy codebase and getting it merge so it’s available to everyone without a having to seek out and install a browser extension?

PriorProject ,

There’s a lot of factors to consider, enough factors that there’s no consensus on how you make this choice and at the end of the day you have to pick one and run with it.

A random list of some factors you could potentially consider before yolo’ing:

  • Is the admin team good? Are they power-tripping jerks? Are they ideologues who are likely to defederate the world for no sensible reason? Do they have a good head for policy? There’s no easy way to evaluate this, you have to look at the sidebar to see who the admins are, stalk their posts a bit, read the modlog for banned users (but he aware that moderation decisions are federated and anonymous so it can be hard to tell what mod did what), and you yourself have to be good enough at these things to recognize quality (or at least alignment with your own values).
  • Is the instance well-funded and is the admin team prepared to deal with the serious stuff like child-porn reports and subpoenas? Again, this is hard to check for. Basically, if an instance has been pretty big for years (there are only like 2 or 3 Lemmy instances like this and they’re all overloaded) or has the admin team run some other big service before?
  • Are the instance rules compatible with your topic? Don’t run a porn sub in an instance that bans porn. There are vibe concerns as well, like an edgelord meme community is not going to do well on a hyper-moderated safe-space-oriented instance.
  • Is the community topic geographically based? You might want to pick an instance homed in that geography. This can be eval’ed by using ip-lookup tools of the instance doesn’t advertise its geography.
  • Is the instance homed in a jurisdiction that has favorable laws for your topic? It’s better to host a community for sex-work or bourbon on an instance in a jurisdiction where those things are legal, rather than in the UAE.
  • Is there a topic instance that specializes in your topic? There’s a pathfinder TTRPG instance and a star trek instance, is there one for your topic? Note that topic-based instances can fail some other and more important criteria like being an experienced admin team. It’s possible that a topic instance is NOT the right choice, but it’s worth considering.
  • Is the server overloaded already? Mebbe pick a different one.
  • Is there already a well run community on another instance? Help that one grow, don’t splinter the community further.

There are many more factors to consider, and no one considers them all. Eventually you have to pick an instance that’s “good enough” and run with it. But those are some of the major factors one could consider if you’re willing to put in the non-trivial amount of effort required to evaluate them.

PriorProject ,

The splintering is an issue I’ve run into already. When I searched for squaredcircle on the assumption the subreddit community had started moving, I got results for five ‘squaredcircle’ communities across five different instances and none of them have a significant membership.

Yeah, I blame Lemmy’s fairly terrible cross-instance community discovery and just being young. Reddit had overlapping communities as well (tons of DnD subreddits, tons of aiti subreddits, and there were plenty of high-profile community split events over mod policies). But because it was so well established in recent years… most communities had standardized on one well-run subreddit.

But Lemmy’s community search is so poor, I think folks legit fail to find bigger/better off-instance communities and so no single one gets a toe-hold to gain critical-mass… they all just kind of smoulder with catching fire. Hopefully better community discovery will come and the well-run communities start to rise to the top.

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