blue_berry @ blue_berry @lemmy.world

Coder, Artist, Blogger (https://fungiverse.wordpress.com/, https://philpape

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2 yr. ago

"Whispers from the Digital Crypt"

Within the oppressive confines of my ancestral home, I found myself seated before my father's ancient laptop, its cold metallic frame echoing with the weight of generations past. As I absentmindedly scrolled through the obscure recesses of the digital world, I stumbled upon a result that whispered of dark intentions, a sinister recommendation seeping forth from the depths of my search engine. And to my mounting dread, it clung to me like a phantom's curse, no matter how desperately I tried to banish it.

The room itself bore the heavy burden of history, its walls adorned with portraits of forebears long forgotten, their eyes seeming to follow me with silent reproach. The flickering candlelight cast grotesque shadows upon their pallid faces, as if they, too, were privy to the malevolence that had manifested on the laptop's screen.

My fingers, trembling with trepidation, traced the haunted keys as I sought to unravel the enigma before me. Yet, with each futile attempt to erase this digital malevolence, it grew stronger, morphing into a specter that defied my every command. It was as though an ancient curse had been invoked, binding me to a sinister fate beyond my control.

The recommendation had not been my own desire, but rather a malevolent whisper from the abyss. It beckoned me toward an abyssal abyss of darkness, one I had no intention of entering. Yet, the cursed tendrils of code clung to my every click and keystroke, refusing to relent, ensnaring me within their inescapable web.

As the night deepened, the laptop's glow took on an eerie, otherworldly hue, casting ghastly reflections upon the time-worn portraits that adorned the chamber's walls. The room seemed to exhale an air of malevolence, and I was but a helpless captive in this gothic labyrinth of digital torment.

In the suffocating silence of my ancestral home, I was left with an unsettling certainty—an inescapable truth that gripped my very soul: I had unwittingly opened a digital Pandora's box, and its relentless, gothic malevolence would haunt me, in perpetuity, within these hallowed and cursed walls.

Doesn't matter which (but preferably the latter). Its more of a thought-experiment ...

Made an issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2137

Default-Local-Feed was also noted as bad user-experience in this article: https://www.androidauthority.com/reddit-alternatives-lemmy-3335429/

Sure, there are categorization tools like Lemmy map that let you look up instances, but the Matrix-like grid will certainly not make things any easier for the average user. Even after logging into Lemmyworld, it took me a while to figure out that the local tab restricts all conversations to discussions on the Lemmyworld server. Switching the tab to all and catching up on discussions happening in the broader multiverse of Reddit alternatives is also possible. Still, there’s no visual identifier that guides you toward it.

Ok, I take that.

So the thing is: I don't want to push users towards the Local-feed. That's just what currently happening if you go to the front page. Local is selected as default. You can switch to All but often enough, I at least don't do it.

Why is that? Because instances have less control of the All-feed, its often enough full of crap and the post of small instances will almost never appear in the All-feed. So they select Local as default and I, as a user, have to always switch between Local and All, which is annoying. I want to see whats going on on my instance but I also want to discover stuff from all over the threadiverse.

My solution is to combine the two into one feed, which simply picks posts from the respective feeds based on probabilities.

I often do that but often enough I just stay on local out of convenience. It would be great to have just one feed for that where you can get both

Why?

Well its not proven or anything that's true. But until now no one convinced me otherwise.

Because of this: https://lemmy.world/post/5110170

I think this is too much of a generalization. Certain discussions even benefit from a certain amount of shielding from the outside world. I think there are mechanics working both ways, and to generally equate local feeds with reduced discussion quality is a poor argument.

I'm not saying Local feed in general, but showing users the Local feed first. Because I'm speaking about the average user, who will usually go with the default settings. Then this user will only see content of their instance and that's bad.

Also, how would the addition of another feed (read: the selectable option for another feed) change anything about that? Instance owners who “push users” to their Local feed (as you unecessarily dramatize it) could still choose Local as their default, even if you requested new feed was implemented. In both scenarios (with and without the new feed), users can freely select another feed anytime (because no one actually pushes them), or even define one permanently in their settings, overriding whatever default the instance owner had selected.

I'm always speaking about the average user. Not even the average Lemmy-User currently but let's say: non-nerdy users that will be more present in the future. They don't tinker with settings and maybe switch instances if they don't like their experience. Choosing default settings is therefore important.

The new feed would do nothing about the situation but give instance owners another option to “push users”, and users another option to select from.

Every admin has the motivation for their instance to survive. They need to have some handle to ensure that. As long as it is transparent and applies to basic rules I'm fine with it. The rest is handled by federation.

I just called it Explore because its called that in Mastodon. Mixed is also fine.

To include Local, you could also make a slider with two slide-poitns:

Local All Subscribed

==()===========()==

It’s not clear where the numeric preferences (e.g. 10/40/50) should be defined. Is it in user settings? Or should it be right next to the Subscribed/Explore/Local/All toggle? And is it a digit input field, or a graphical control like sliders? Anyways, details.

I don't know but yeah I think that would be details.

I’d also like the option to always show new posts or posts with new comments from favorited communities. This could help small communities and their subscribers to get things going.

But that's what subscribed is for, right?

Or well, we can implement both ideas with the same mechanic: Allow me to override the likelihood with which a post from a specific community shows up in my feed. This way, I can include both big and active communities in which I’m only mildly interested, and small and rarely active communities in which I’m very interested in the same feed.

This could also be addressed by giving smaller communities slightly more weight in general. To prevent their posts not appearing because bigger more active communities. But I think that's a different problem. Also, it was also trying to be addressed here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3907

No it doesn't. It addresses a different problem, namely: posts from small instances should be somehow boosted in my feed.

The problem I try to address is regarding posts from my local instance vs. posts from all federated instances. I would like to have a sorting that gives up a good mix here and that would also be in line with admin's motivations to keep their instances alive. As described here: https://lemmy.world/post/5110168 their chose to promote the All/Explore or the Local feed can be modeled with problem from game theory and can result in admins to choosing to promote only the local feed if they find that the All-feed gives their posts a disadvantage and over long, drains away their user engagement. Scaled sort will not be able to fix that.

(Actually should have written that in the description)

Ok but that's about the problem of redundancy in the threadiverse. That's a different discussion.

Mmh ... why call it weight? You probably still want to sum it up to 100, right? So why not just call it probability right away?

Then if I see too much from worldnews, I can scale it down to 50 and see half as much from that community in my feed. The goal being that I can adjust the proportions of different contents types without blocking users or unsubscribing entirely.

That's basically a fully custumizable feed, right? Yeah, that would also be cool. Altough maybe a bit of over-engineering - don't now if it would be that useful to the average user.

Edit: I think this also addresses the problem that smaller communities don't appear as often between very active communities. I think this should be solved with a better sorting algorithm (already tried to fix here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3907). But in part, this also needs to be fixed by the community, because discussion quality in some communities isn't what it could be. This will probably change over time and then, for the average user, I think it will be enough to unsubscribe. I still think weights are a bit too much.

Thanks to @Spzi@lemm.ee for half of the idea

Thanks to @Spzi@lemm.ee for half of the idea

I love that! Just made a post about it ...

I'm basically just suggesting a feed that takes the Local and All feed, and merges it 50/50. Meaning you have the posts in the order in which you would normally see them but in the same feed. And its not like first a Local post, then an All post, then the next Local post but a bit more shaked up: for each post in the list, a coin is thrown if the next local or all post is picked.

I'm basically just suggesting a feed that takes the Local and All feed, and merges it 50/50. Meaning you have the posts in the order in which you would normally see them but its not like first a Local post, then an All post, then the next Local post but a bit more shaked up.