Ok, so one of the bigger problems I see on Lemmy is the fact that I subscribe to dozens of different communities, but my feed is always the same. News news news technology technology technology.
What if I want something lighthearted? What if I DON’T want to see certain topics???
Maybe I’m at work, and a big sports game is going on. I don’t want spoilers, so now I can’t look at Lemmy.
Or what if Nintendo hosts a Nintendo Direct before I get a chance to see it? Welp. Can’t look at Lemmy.
But…what if I could? What if my main feed was exactly what it is now. But what if I had user created catagories? I could make one called “News”. Now if I want to see the news, I can include that catagory in my home feed. Or I can exclude it from my home feed. I could switch over to the news catagory, and then every community that I’ve designated under the news catagory that I’ve created will show ONLY those communities home feed.
Or maybe I want to see only video game related stuff.
Or maybe I only want to see sports stuff.
I could even create user created tabs. I could name the first one “Happy” and it could include light hearted catagories. Things like /c/aww and /c/humor
I could have a tab called “Serious” and it could be all news, and updates on the world.
I could have a tab called “Nerdy” and it could be all technology and video game related stuff.
Or I could have my main home tab, where I choose which communities/catagories do and don’t appear.
And you could do the same concept in Mastadon with followed users. If you follow some users who only post about pro-wrestling, and you don’t want to see that? Uncheck your pro-wrestling catagory from your home feed tab. Have a seperate tab just for pro-wrestling.
I’m sure you could implement this with other fediverse services. I just haven’t used many to give examples of how they would work, if I don’t know how the core platforms themselves work.
It took reddit a long time to come up with “Multis” where you put whatever themed channels under one group.
I don’t see why it couldn’t be done here.
Just hijacking the top comment to say that it has been suggested, just not implemented yet https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
its been suggested… i think its called ‘community groups’ or something like it. you could aggregate any community subscriptions into an arbitrary group
it was suggested as a fix for all the same-topic different instance issue… you could add the ‘cats’ community from all the different servers into one group. would fit your needs it sounds like.
Yeah that sounds good too, but it’s not the same thing. I just want a client side filter for lists of communities. No need to involve AP or get consensus amongst many users/communities, just my preferences. If we want to get fancy, have some APIs to store these lists server side so or can with across clients - still strictly single user. It feels so simple I am tenors to get my hands dirty, but for one diving into a new project is usually quite since work and it hardly ever turns out to be as easy as it seems (then again the new python lemmylike thing already has it instance wide, so it at least is doable).
Feel free to upvote this issue on Github: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
It’s the most wanted feature.
I think if people really want it, they can pool together on a bounty.
I just remembered it is even on their roadmap: https://codimd.tyhou12.xyz/s/TukD_H96z#Multi-communities
Nearly 200 upthumbs, more ?!
But the discussion explores broader and narrow variants, need to coalesce.Probably needs a new comment to get people to converge indeed
I just remembered it is even on their roadmap: https://codimd.tyhou12.xyz/s/TukD_H96z#Multi-communities
I see that says ‘has to be local only, not federated’ (same issue also discussed on github).
‘Local only’ suggests to me front-end, i.e. info stored by browser. In that case people who are often switching devices would have to re-organise on each one, which could be tedious.
So isn’t there something in between local and federated - i.e. saved by the instance as user-settings, but not pushed to other instances?
Maybe there could be some manual copying mechanism, so a user who organises a big set of communities could share with others. (This reminds me of mastodon ‘lists’ and various ways of organising and transferring them).So isn’t there something in between local and federated - i.e. saved by the instance as user-settings, but not pushed to other instances?
My understanding was closer to this one.
For instance in my case, it would be something like https://reddthat.com/u/Blaze/multicommunity1, but that wouldn’t get federated to other instances
I thought about this a while ago. My conclusion was that the simplest way to handle this would be to copy multireddits, and expand upon them.
Here’s how I see it working.
Users can create
multiredditsmulticommunitiesmultis as they want. What goes within a multi is up to the user; for example if you want to create a “myfavs” multi with !potatoism, !illegallysmolcats and !anime_art, you do you.The multi owner can:
- edit it - change name, add/remove comms to/from the multi
- make the multi public or private
- use the multi as their feed, instead of Subscribed/Local/All
- use the multi to bulk subscribe, unsub, or block comms
By default a multi would be private, and available only for the user creating it. However, you can make it public if you want; this would create a link for that multi, available for everyone checking your profile. (Or you could share it directly.)
You can use someone else’s public multi as your feed or to bulk subscribe/unsub/block comms. You can also “fork” = copy it; that would create an identical multi associated with your profile, that then you can edit.
Sounds like something that could be implemented client side.
For sure. Probably should be really.
Yes, like this https://piefed.social/topics
This suggestion seems to be a bit different from what you implemented on piedfed. I’m having trouble articulating it though. Something more like a feed of user defined subset of subscribed communities/topics.
Yes, it’s a bit different.
In Kbin they are user-defined. If kbin.social was online I’d share a link.
I didn’t realize kbin.social went offline.
How’s your project going? Are you finding any tradeoffs you made stand out as especially worthwhile or something you’d choose differently if you started over (perhaps something you’re planning to change)?
It’s going well, thanks for asking. I enjoy using it and improving it every day.
Over the last year I’ve learnt a lot and if I started again today I’d lay some of the underlying foundations differently - in a way that supports a medium sized app instead of a small one. At the time I didn’t know if it would ever grow beyond being small… Good problem to have!
Your a victim of your success, it seems.
multireddits is the most requested issue on lemmy , any chance it will be implemented for piefed soon? . the ability to subscribe to posts and incrementally read them is really great so i hoping your project might be better at prioritizing and using feedback effectively. It could really attract more developers/donors/content creators which is good.
Yeah I’m pretty interested in this and Topics is only the first iteration of the idea. At the time piefed.social was basically a single-user instance so making the topics admin-manually-curated groupings was fine. Perhaps it’s time to take things to the next level, tho.
The concept of ‘multireddits’ sounds like a bundle of related functionality and I’m not sure which parts of that you’re interested in that PieFed’s “topics” doesn’t already do. Is it the user-created part? The subscribing part? The join-many-communties-at-once part? PieFed does some of those already but you won’t see it unless you’re logged in…
Is it the user-created part? The subscribing part?
Yeah basically those parts, i guess , for example if i want a multireddit i want “news” without the politics and certain communities (e.g. business and “the police problem” i don’t want), i guess that’s a typical use case for average Joe, he wants news but not too much news. i think there is research showing too much news is bad for mental health and social media might cause radicalization (see a scientific systematic review of the subject)
Yeah user-created topics would be a fine enhancement. Various aspects of the multireddit concept have separate issues in the issue queue but they haven’t been coherently tied together yet. It might be time to do that.
One way to limit exposure to negative news is a keyword filter, which I implemented 6 months ago, early on in the project: https://piefed.social/post/7576
One way to limit exposure to negative news is a keyword filter, which I implemented 6 months ago, early on in the project: https://piefed.social/post/7576
avoidance is generally considered harmful for mental health, what would be better is giving users the ability to curate their information diet, news sources should be trustworthy , display rational reasoning which might help users learn by observation (aka observational learning) , this will be helpful for mental health and mental fitness because rational thinking is associated with mental health.
multireddits could help with that because instead of getting just news about ukraine/israel/sudan/iran from a general community, you could get it from communities specific to those conflicts , the people subscribing to these communities are probably more motivated to discuss it so they will generate more rational thinking (which is more effortful so it requires more motivation).
kbin had collections. Im on mbin now and I was not able to find it but im not sure if that is just because I may not be able to find the config. Trust cafe (not part of the federation) has a neat concept which I would love to see in the fediverse. Basically all the things you can block or subscribe also has a trust which is basically a weight on how much you favor it. By default they are 50 but you can raise or lower them. So you could drop news sources to 25 and hobby ones to 75 lets say and now the hobbies will be given greater weight in your feed. You can do it with users to so if you have someone who posts good stuff you can weight them higher. On the other side if someones stuff tends to be crap but you don’t want to outright block them you can just dial them down to 5 or something
Is kbin gone?
They pretty much are, people moved to mbin: https://feddit.nl/post/16832203?scrollToComments=true
Thnx!
no idea but I have not been able to get the site for awhile. earnest briefly came back and said he was handing some stuff off and it worked for a day or so and then its been pretty much offline since then. long enough im not even sure how long its been now. unfortunately I had trouble transfering over the config. im going to have to subscirbe and block from zero I think.
tag-following / tag-muting?
You could make a different account for each category. Would be kind of clunky having to switch when you want to read each category.
I use this workflow, and used it on reddit as well. Here I have different accounts on different instances. Mobile apps lets you change between them easily. On desktop I just open them in a different tabs.
It would be cool if you could make your own tabs, so that everytime you subscribe to a community, you can go down a checklist of tabs you created, picking ones you think that belongs to.
Fo now, I guess the work around is to have several usernames divided by categories, but that seems cumbersome and disjonted.
Yeah I was also thinking about multiple users for this, but that’s a terrible hack on so many levels…
The solution is post tagging ive seen some discussion on implementation but i dont believe it federates with mastodon tags.
