this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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sh.itjust.works Main Community

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is that setting in the web UI? Cuz I can't find it in Jerboa.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Cuz I can’t find it in Jerboa

It's in account settings

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, in the web UI. Haven't tried any apps yet though that's on my to-do list.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Well, it's not like there are thousands of them, lol, there's Jerboa for Android and Mlem for iOS, that's it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

you can just unsubscribe from that community for now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, blocked it, there is no other way for now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It wouldn't need to be fancy. Could literally be "automatically hide every second post from this community".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Weighting by community, so my feed isnt completely overrun by cats and I see enough Norwegian death metal crochet posts

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Feed overrun by cats.... What's the problem?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That sounds like a great idea.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe it can get requested on like github or something idk where the devs are contactable

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can just block communitys

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

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