I wouldn’t like to actually block a community all together here, but yeah, I would like to see less posts of that community. Is there a way to do this, either in Jerboa or the web UI?
Lemmy doesn’t have a concept of what a “post like this” is. It only categorizes posts based on simple statistics like “number of recent votes”, which I believe drive the “hot” ranking or number of recent comments (active), or the date of the post.
Creating a concept of a “post like this” would generally require an AI/ML classification pipeline. This kind of thing is common at big social media companies, but it’s pretty computationally expensive compared to regular browsing. It’s also somewhat ideologically fraught as it’s the same tech big social media companies use to create algorithmic echo chambers and drive unhealthy engagement. I realize your proposed use-case is pretty innocuous… but I suspect many folks will extrapolate to view the proposal through that lens.
I don’t see folks champing at the bit to immediately add a feature that would add to the capacity woes the biggest instances are already feeling, but I’m equally sure you’re not alone in desiring features that would need to be built on top of classification pipelines. Maybe someday Lemmy will have one, but it doesn’t exist today.
Edit: Maybe a less general approach to this would be to offer a weighting for each community, and lemmy would skip some percentage of posts to that sub in your feed. This isn’t how most commercial sites would do this, but it’s simple and maybe close to what you want. It also doesn’t exist today though.
I think it’d make sense to have a sorting by (number of recent votes)/(number of votes in other recent posts in that community). That way posts from larger communities have less of an advantage.
Edit: Maybe a less general approach to this would be to offer a weighting for each community, and lemmy would skip some percentage of posts to that sub in your feed. This isn’t how most commercial sites would do this, but it’s simple and maybe close to what you want. It also doesn’t exist today though.
That is a good idea, others have suggested this as well. Like maybe add weight to certain communities, but be only profile wise, so you can tweak your own profile, which won’t intefre with other’s feeds.
Also, a warn prompt when blocking communities would be nice as well. I’ve blocked a few communities by mistake, unblocked them afterwards, but had to log in the web UI to unblock them, there is no unblock community/user option in Jerboa.
Want to thank you for digging into why these are difficult concepts to reconcile. It seems incredibly simple in hindsight but the explanation is helpful.
It seems like you’re confusing general recommendation algorithms like Google News/discover that suggests content you might like based on your perceived interests with a forum/link aggregator that ranks content based on time, upvotes and on your literal subscriptions.
Reddit didn’t have this feature because that’s not how the system works.
How do you propose to do a “show less like this” referring to recommended content when Lemmy does not “recommend” anything at all.
It wouldn’t need to be fancy. Could literally be “automatically hide every second post from this community”.
Or just “count upvotes from posts from this community as half” when sorting posts by Hot. Maybe calculating the score of a post from both the points and the size of the community so that posts from smaller communities are visible too.
Weighting by community, so my feed isnt completely overrun by cats and I see enough Norwegian death metal crochet posts
Feed overrun by cats… What’s the problem?
As a reddit transplant (aren’t we all?) I’m going to be avoiding cat subreddits entirely. Not that I don’t like them, it just opens the floodgates for me to subscribe to all of them and I’ll be back to square zero.
That sounds like a great idea.
Maybe it can get requested on like github or something idk where the devs are contactable
They’re on Github but pretty swamped atm.
At the moment we are urgently working to solve major issues, such as optimizing slow database queries, ripping out the inefficient websocket API, and fixing a major security vulnerability (big thanks to deadcade). In addition we suddenly have to manage dozens of pull requests. To give us time to work on these priorities, it would be very beneficial if users could refrain from interacting with issue trackers when possible. Before opening an issue, make sure that it hasn’t been reported before. And when writing comments, make sure that they actually contribute to solving the issue at hand. Generally it is better to move discussions to Lemmy if possible.
Interesting approach
Maybe like a personal pereference in your profile which you can tweak. Not for every community, but for ones added, yes.
Not what you’re asking, but it took me the longest time to figure out that you can set your default home page to your subscribed communities instead of whatever is more-or-less-randomly hosted on sh.itjust.works. (It’s the “Type” setting in your user profile). Hopefully this helps anyone who stumbles on this.
Is that setting in the web UI? Cuz I can’t find it in Jerboa.
Yeah, in the web UI. Haven’t tried any apps yet though that’s on my to-do list.
Well, it’s not like there are thousands of them, lol, there’s Jerboa for Android and Mlem for iOS, that’s it.
Cuz I can’t find it in Jerboa
It’s in account settings
Yeah, but you tap on it (in Jerboa) and nothing happens, the drop down menu doesn’t work. I tried it in the web UI and the default sort type setting set to Active does work, but the default listing type (Local, Subscribed and All) doesn’t work. When I load my account (Jerboa or web UI, regardless) the default listing type is always set to Local, regardless of what I chose in the web UI (which, yes, does reflect in Jerboa, but has no effect).
you can just unsubscribe from that community for now.
Yeah, blocked it, there is no other way for now.
You might have to do this client side. Hide some data in local storage about what communities to downweight. Then look at the page, find all the posts, pull out the community name and check if it ought to be downweighted. Then do something like hash the title, turn that into a float on 0 to 1, compare with the fraction of posts from the community that you want to see, and if it fails hide the post in CSS.
That’s a lot of custom work that has to be redone if the UI changes. It’s better if it’s implemented in backend, in Lemmy source.
If you have control of your instance’s backend, that’s definitely the better approach.
Over on AT Protocol they have a system of pluggable algorithms. You can publish info on an “algorithm” to your account’s profile, and people can add your algorithm as a feed on their homepage, and then when they request their homepage their home server contacts your server and tells it a bit about them, and you send back a feed of posts.
So people can customize the post selection and share those customizations without the instance/home server admin needing to be in on it.
Hm, like a hook… should work.
Will look into this a bit more. Thanks for the tips 👍.
The closest I can think of (and I don’t know if that’s implemented) is a personal filter, which doesn’t show posts containing some word or words. Or you could block specific users who post content you don’t like. RiF could do that, maybe jerboa as well, otherwise you could post your issue on the GitHub page.
Hm… might just open a GH issue. Cuz there are only 2 options right now, completely block and completely allow, both of them are not exactly what I’d like.
You can just block communitys
I know, but that wasn’t the point. It’s not that I don’t wanna see anything from certain communities, but this particular one was in every 2nd post on the feed 😒. It’s a popular community, I know, posts get upvoted, commented, etc., thus they show higher on the feed. Still, it feels a bit spammy. I like cats just as much as the next person, but not in every 2nd post.
I am trying go subscribe to many communities to help dilute that, and I also try changing the views on my subscribed feed between new, hot, and active. (At least on Jerboa)
Maybe this gets added in the future to help encourage more adoption.
Ah, well, currently there is no option to change that in your subscribed feed.
Since there only are tools for filter or arrange contents, nor complex algorithms suggesting contents, this kind of functions are not implemented.
Perhaps someday some finer filtering by community or some way to limit the number of posts from each community will be implemented.
But I don’t think it’s a priority for developers at this time.
Yeah, guessed as much. There are other more important things that need addressing.
I’ll open a GH issue nonetheless. Maybe they’ll just put it on a to do list for future releases.
