Admittedly, I spent very little time on Mastodon. But as I remember it, there is something like a ‘home feed’. And I also remember only seeing the most recent entries at the top, which is not necessarily what I would have found the most interesting. For example, I think I’d be at least equally interested in entries with engagement, where people talk about the post. Which sometimes requires some time to pass.
You’re right I lost track about the precise topic, sorry for that.
What are these algorithms you talk about?
Currently, we have these: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/blob/main/src/users/03-votes-and-ranking.md
You want it to be sorted by what is interesting. How do you deterine what is interesting to you?
People don’t need to science it. They can choose different modes from the dropdown, stick with what they like for whatever reason, or play around. Or even ignore the option altogether. Personally, I use ‘New Comments’ as my default, inspect communities with ‘New’, and occasionally switch to ‘Hot’, ‘Active’ and ‘Top X Hours’ when I’m looking for more.
In terms of manipulation, I guess the biggest lever here is to which instance I log in, followed by which communities I subscribe to. This heavily influences the type of content I see, the political leaning, and things like that. How this content is sorted into a feed is a minor decision in comparison.
How about give the users control over the algorithm? Akin to Lemmy, where we can at least choose one of many sorting algorithms, including chronological. But I only use ‘New’ when checking out specific communities. For the actual feed, I very much prefer an algorithmic approach.
I don’t see it as the platform’s responsibility to “create an unbiased recommendation algorithm without creating echo chambers”. Give me the means to prevent that, yes. But please let me decide for myself wether I want a wide or narrow range of topics, and which flavor.
you telling me that I’m not allowed
You are not your Lemmy account, and you are specifically not one single Lemmy account. If you don’t like the policy of an instance, you can try to change it or go somewhere else. Ok right, in the attempt to influence policy, you can play the ‘you telling me that I’m not allowed’-card.
Now that I think about it, the most uncensored Lemmy experience is being logged out. Every content is visible, no middle man can hinder you to visit these sites. It’s a bit like when a public library decides to organize their books into separate rooms. Would you call that censorship because you have to walk between the rooms to access all the content?
Censorship would be fitting if certain content would be erased from the library. I think that’s only possible on Lemmy if all instances agree.
what’s stuck out to you as stumbling blocks, or basic user experience fumbles?
For Lemmy:
- Onboarding. Newcomers should not have to decide which instance to use. They know nothing to make that decision. An algorithm should make an educated guess. Even a random pick might be better than forcing them to choose. Manual choice should still be available as an advanced signup method, but the default should be as quick and simple as possible.
- Account Migration. The lack thereof only increases the pressure for making a good choice for your first instance. If we could easily migrate accounts, this would also ease the signup burden. 3rd party tools exist, but this should be a core feature.
- Discovery. There exist dozens of tools for discovering communities, which shows how bad the built-in search function is. This should be a core feature with no need for 3rd party tools. I should not have to care wether someone else from my instance already searched for the same community or wether I’m the first.
- Stream Aggregation. I signed up to loads of niche communities (which do get new posts), but never see any of those in my stream, no matter which mode I choose. I even started to unsubscribe from big communities to give smaller content a chance, to no avail. This effectively hides original and interesting content from view, and makes the overall experience more boring.
- Remote Instance Posts and Comments. When looking up a specific post or comment, I probably cannot do so while being logged in. Which means, I can read it, but cannot interact with it.
- Remote Instance Communities. When browsing the communities of another instance (for example, a themed instance like mander.xyz), I can only do so while being logged out. When I find an interesting community, I have to manually copy the link, search for it in another logged-in tab, find it again, to finally subscribe.
- Lack of Niche Content. It’s getting better, but we still have a long way to go. This probably needs more general growth, but some technical aspects (like Stream Aggregation, Discovery and Remote Instance Browsing) also make it harder for niche communities to gain traction.
- GDPR Compliance. A private person and a public institution (which publishes educational content and videos) explicitly mentioned to me that they cannot join Lemmy since Lemmy cannot assure GDPR Compliance. I don’t know wether that’s true, just reporting the reason.
Overall, it still requires significant willingness to either accept missing features and content, or jump through technical hoops to regain some.
My experience on other fediverse platforms was similar, which most often resulted in me staying away from that particular service for now.
While I don’t fully share that sentiment, I acknowledge it’s a point frequently brought up.
So, looking for a compromise … is there hope in growth? Like, with numbers big enough, it should become feasible to have an instance which strictly blocks all political leanings of ‘your despised flavor’, and still have enough content to look at.
Would that be a solution for you, for example @awwwyissss@lemm.ee or @PP_BOY_@lemmy.world? Lemmy as a whole would still have ‘bad stuff’, but there would be a ‘clean instance’ which you can recommend, from which no ‘bad stuff’ can be seen.
I simply skipped thinking about better wordings for ‘some expressions’. Please bear with me. I didn’t mean to judge.
I was trying to address a point that is frequently raised by people that gave Lemmy a try but are not planning to stay: seeing the same content posted across a few similar communities hinders content discovery, and just provides a worse browsing experience than centralized solutions like Reddit.
Not trying to be mean, but … you’re making a post about redundancy because other people make posts about redundancy? :D
In these other posts, a frequent answer is: Reddit isn’t that much different. A popular example is /r/gaming or /r/games or whatever. Apparently there are multiple subs for the same topic, sometimes with little to no differences.
Then some people object “but that’s not the same, they have different names”, to which others reply “on lemmy, the full name includes the instance, so we don’t have same name communities here, either”.
I think, bottom line, the two platforms aren’t very different in this regard. On both, users can create new subs/comms even if the exact same content already exists. And they do. Sometimes both survive, sometimes not. On both, users decide “with their feet”.
One relevant difference might be that in the Fediverse, redundancy actually has value. It protects against defederation, unstable servers, servers disappearing.
I still see value in combining duplicates. When I see a new community popping up, and I know a very similar thing already exists, I might leave a note in the new community wether they might want to participate in the other community instead. Just in case they were not aware it exists.
But aside from the Fediverse-specific reasons for duplicates, there are additional general reasons, which is why we see the same phenomenon on reddit. For example, people might dislike the moderation in the ‘original’. Or one might allow bots, the other not.
While this is my point of view (“it’s a non-issue”), I also note it’s a topic which is frequently brought up. Apparently, it’s frequently seen as an issue. This may be rooted in perception (including the fact that reddit is monolithic, falsly leading to the misconception it would only have one sub for one topic, all while it still has plenty of redundant duplicates) and communication (I got the feeling the fediverse’s federated structure is sometimes over-emphasized and creates more worries than necessary).
We probably will get technical solutions like grouping on a user-view level. Maybe some apps already have that. GitHub issues exist.
Aside from technical solutions, people can vote with their feet. It is of course perfectly fine to address and re-address the topic. This might help consolidate similar communities. Personally, I think having a few redundant communities is healthy for the nature of the fediverse.
I’m subscribed to four communities named "fediverse@"something. Yes, it’s a bit annoying. But it’s also good to have backups, in the sense that I never know which instance might defederate from my own or from others who also use these communities.
Not sure what the point of this post is. Do you want people to vote on which to keep, and which to discard? They already do that. People subscribe and unsubscribe, post or don’t, as they please. Apparently, we continuously vote on having four (probably even more) redundant communities.
I’m not sure how the developer’s intention or leaning affects me. Or how my usage or non-usage affects their intention or leaning, or how they can act on it. Maybe my usage provides data for them to improve their tools? But since the tools themselves are agnostic, I’m not sure how that’s a bad thing either.
if there’s a good alternative with no such controversies
Strictly speaking about functionality, I saw no alternative which is on par to the .agency tool. It has more features, is faster, provides more information and causes less strain on network servers. At least that’s my quick impression.
Anyways, thanks for the conversation!
It’s made by kiwifarms though
I didn’t know, thanks for letting me know. I frankly do not care though, in the exact same way that I do not care that Lemmy is made by tankies.
The interesting bit would be how people with these extreme agencies abuse these tools or their users to further their goals.
As I see it, both cases are questionable people providing useful tools free for me to use. Wether I use these tools or not, has what impact in regards to their agenda? I certainly would not like to be a pawn in their game, or support their cause without consent.
If you think that’s what happens, please show me. That would be very interesting to know and might lead to me ceasing usage / recommendation.
Thanks, bookmarked!
Just linking a similar tool because I haven’t seen it being mentioned yet: https://fba.ryona.agency/
[Lemmy] servers can be run for only a few hundred dollars per month.
The median seems to be much lower, like 10, 20 or 30 per month. Many admins reported they ran a server for other purposes anyways, and just had to pay for the domain to add a Lemmy instance.
It’s only after a few thousand users that the bill goes 3 digits.
At least that’s the impression I got from reading a few posts about this.
My biggest issue with crossposts is when people don’t use it, but make new, unlinked posts :-P
I liked the idea from this comment:
Show comment sections from all other posts combined in each crosspost. View options:
- All combined in one
- Each post on it’s own
(So for a post with 2 crossposts, there exist 3 posts. The comment section has 3 tabs for each post, and a 4th tab for the combined view.)
It might make sense to (optionally) normalize comment scores for combined views. How well did this comment fare relative to it’s post and sibling comments?
Spending 2 minutes on GitHub, I haven’t found a related issue in either lemmy or lemmy-ui.
added to my todo list.
Awesome! Will check the communities again in the coming days.
Apologize if I ran afoul of any code-of-conduct. Haven’t used the cross-post before and I wasn’t sure if it would work across instances.
It’s just my belief of a best practice, I’m not even sure this is a shared sentiment. So, no worries :D
The advantage of cross-posting is, each post will have a list of all the other communities in which it was posted, cross-referencing each other. It works across instances.
That’s a great idea! Subscribed to some, thanks.
My suggestions / wishlist:
- climate change
- environment
- ai development
- Europe
- reporting from conflicts/wars
- news covering the fediverse (mastodon, kbin, lemmy, …)
A sidenote: I noticed you made a few independent but identical announcements. I believe it is best practice to make one post, and cross-post from there.
For those who don’t know what Firefish is: https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Firefish%3F