Wow. This is pretty impressive since you usually only see these kinds of things from big tech companies and their stuff is definitely NOT privacy friendly.
Can you provide more detail on how it works and how it is different than what big tech is doing?
Thanks a bunch! It took me a while to craft the solution to make sure it was both effective + private. I was originally inspired by Canopy. They built a news aggregator with private & personalized posts a few years back and the idea sat in my head.
To answer your question(s), there are quite a few signals that big tech uses to recommend content. Not all of them are privacy invasive (or at least they don’t HAVE to be). My approach was to do thorough research on the different signals used by big tech to make their recommendation engines, and just build ones that 1.) were possible given fediverse API limitations and 2.) private. I had to craft some novel approaches to make it work but I’m pretty happy with the outcome!
One of the biggest differences between the “big tech” approach and Quiblr’s is that most big tech does not keep data simply on your device. They store it in datacenters to build large social-webs to essentially cluster users (and push more relevant ads).
But I was able utilize many of the other signals used by big tech (e.g. communities you engage with, metadata of content you read, dwell time, post/comment/vote activity) and I designed it to work offline with no servers.
How does it make the decision to recommend one post over another using the data it collects? Also does it treat all that data differently when ranking posts?
Thanks! I work on Quiblr in my free time as a side project. I’ve never managed an open source project on my own, but I’m working with a buddy who has experience managing open source projects. I’ll let you know!
I really miss having Liftoff work because it has been the only app I’ve used on android that actually had a functioning search feature that let you search individual posts, community names, instances, or users.
This is flipping amazing. UX beats big corps hands down, recommendations are greatly innovative. One little thing: can we have a back button? It’s a bit clunky when I have to go to the top of my browser every time I go back from a post. Other than that, it looks great!
I’d also expect another big jump when clients like Sync and Boost get their apps for Lemmy online. That will attract an enormous amount of users from reddit.
Totally agree! I just have been a registered reader on Reddit. Now, it’s the first time I’m participating - might be considerably because lemmy is trending. Nevertheless, I found communities and post I’m interested in within minutes - 👌🏼 whereas Reddit was mostly clutter.
You need both though. Memes and shitposts to scroll though and chuckle, and then quality stuff to engage on. Lemmys got that, and the momentum will keep it growing.
I tried lemmy like a year or so ago, and it felt so stale. The technology is there, but the content just wasn’t. That’s clearly changed now. 😊
Would be nice if there was a way for posts to be flagged such that memes and shitposts and more serious discussions could be separated, so you could filter depending on mood.
Yep, also an easier way to explore/sign up and filter instances and their different pages. I’m new and have no idea what I’m doing regarding that. So far I’m just signing up to instances and hoping new interesting stuff appears on my page… I’m on Lemmy.world as I assume we all are, how do I view the different pages on this instance or is it all just in a singular feed?
Hit the communities button near the top of the page to subscribe and view. You don’t need to sign up to more instances unless you really want to, we can post on any federated instance. It’s weird at first but you’ll get it.
Discoverability is something that could definitely use more work. Right now I recommend the site lemmyverse.net/communities, which is searchable and shows subscriber and active user counts. It should help you find where the most populated communities for your interests are located, if they already exist over here.
Your front page has three feeds. All is just what you’d expect. Local filters to only show posts from your home instance (lemmy.world in your case). I find it’s mostly useful if you’re registered to a smaller instance and want to keep up with local concerns.
Home shows updates for all communities you are subscribed to.
I’m on sh.itjust.works, others might be on lemm.ee, lemmy.zip, feddit.uk, etc., but we can all interact with each other. That’s one of the benefits of the fediverse.
I’m dying with the lack of baseball communication. The biggest Baseball and Atlanta Braves communities are pretty much dead and I really miss talking ball.
I was lamenting the lack of an NFL community here but no way in hell I’m joining a Dallas Cowboys community regardless of how much discussion it generates. 😆
Phillies fan checking in. Agree. I have a community with a bot that posts game updates like Reddit (which is nice) but the game threads are mainly me posting once or twice and one or two other people with side off comments. No community engagement so to speak. Long way from the Reddit game threads of several thousand comments.
Feel your pain. I’m constantly thinking, what the hell do I have to do to get r/orioles to follow me over to Lemmy to grow the numbers? They are one of the only things left at Reddit that I regularly look at. But 99% of the mod and user base there just doesn’t care about the the issue.
Conversely, that means that at least sports spaces are among the least bot-spammed places on Reddit. So there’s that.
Sports is definitely hard to have take off in these sorts of spaces, since sports are generally talked about much more amongst regular/casual users, than the more tech-savvy crowd who are willing to try these things out.
It’s the same on the biggest ActivityPub platform (Mastodon) - the really popular regular subjects such as sports and cars just don’t have a presence there.
The best thing you can do to help is to comment on threads. I know it feels weird to comment in an empty post, but it does tend to spur lurkers to respond.
Shameless plug for !baseball (check out our sidebar for the team-specific communities). We’ve got the game bots ported over and are working on improving them and adding new features.
I agree with !matt though, the Venn diagram of sports fans and tech-savvy lemmy pioneers is pretty small. You can help by posting and commenting to attract more users. More content == more users (eventually).
I’m usually a lurker, but I decided to just go ahead and make one that I was missing. Something about personally wanting Lemmy to grow is motivating to me.
I made an XCOM community on Lemmy.world, and even though I’m the only one posting so far, it’s fun to watch the subscriber count grow. Already at 50!
Please definitely don’t be discouraged in the slightest, TPM.
Single-game forums were almost always the smallest gaming subreddits on Reddit, often times being several orders of magnitude smaller than the “gaming in general” communities.
But that special feeling of having other people passionate about that specific game you love can’t be beat. Hang in there, and you’ll definitely grow and get that engagement in time.
May I suggest doing an informal poll of some sort to boost engagement? I’m not that familiar with XCOM, but it’s a pretty big series with a lot of games, right? Maybe just a simple “which is your favorite XCOM game?” thread.
They will. My experience community building thus far is that if you can build up one anchor community to the point where people are organically sharing content and commenting, other adjacent communities will start to generate the same sorts of things with smaller subscriber bases because that anchor community is keeping people’s eyes here. Just a question of time.
Yes, when you make a post look at the line where the ‘save post’ button is at the bottom of the entry. There will be two overlapping squares. That’s the crosspost button.
It just definitely needed to hit a critical mass. Enough that people had enough to read, stick around, and post themselves. Which in turn created a place that new people felt had enough content.
It’s also about search engine indexing. It’s happening slowly, but I’ve noticed Lemmy posts are finally beginning to show up in Google/Bing search results. As this trend improves, more people will stumble here by accident and then join out of curiosity.
I thought I was gonna be able to quit Reddit full time. Didn’t look for a few days, then did. Still check since some niche communities aren’t over here (or active) yet so I have to go there. But I only still check every few days (I was a several time a day redditor so usage is down) and I’ll check Lemmy at least once or twice a day now.
Your comment made me smile! I’ve worked hard to make Quiblr a platform for the fediverse to be clean, modern, and accessible. Basically - remove all the friction that generally comes with fediverse apps
I still haven’t been able to give up reddit but I have always been a lurker there. Here I’m trying to make a conscious effort to participate in conversations. I’m trying to be positive, kind, and thoughtful because that’s what I want lemmy to be.
I started to think of Reddit as just an occasional Google search result necessary evil and have successfully ignored it ever since. Log off DKC, there’s a better world out there.
In all seriousness I think eventually conventional social media will start to feel very siloed like AOL did as more people join the fediverse. I can’t imagine using a site that I couldn’t look at everything from anymore, save for stupid ass Facebook which I do solely for sovcit material. Why would I want to look at crap ads and AI when I can be here?
Similar here. Reddit has become, for better or worse, just another Facebook. I include in my search queries when I need. I get in for specific communities and get out immediately afterwards.
Just out of curiosity, how much does it cost per month to run a Lemmy instance? Not that I’d want to do that myself, I’m just grateful for our admins that keep Lemmy up and running.
You can rent an instance for like 10 dollars per month and grow from there. Then expand if you get users and things get slow. Lemmy runs ok on 4 GB of memory but it’s better with 8 GB. Postgres use the most.
I’m curious as well. I want to selfhost a personal instance, but CGNAT is getting on the way. I can always pay for VPS, but then the recent shenanigans involving CSAM images potentially being synced from rogue instances scared me.
I don’t watch reels, shorts, tiktoks or any other short for videos and Loops is not an exception. I moved from Instagram to Pixelfed for the sole purpose of getting atleast some audience for my photography since Instagram wants you to post videos instead.
@Penguin_Rocket@Noodle07 hahaha i'm honored but i was not the one to say it first :neocat_laugh_sweat: i saw this on a meme that was going around fedi at the time and i tend to just post silly stuff that goes through my mind without context and i was thinking of the meme
I built the Quiblr web app. I love the idea of being able to filter results for a given instance! I will see if I can push an update tonight
Edit: I pushed an update to implement Advanced Search options on the Communities Page. Given how the API works, community IDs are different between each Instance so you can’t view the post feed on another Instance’s community -but- I made a solution that lets you VIEW the communities on different instances (regardless of your home instance). If you are not signed in, you can change the instance with a single button push.
Yes, you can go to your profile and click on “Saved” to see your starred posts/comments.
One annoying thing is that it’s sorted by the original posting date, not the time you saved it, which might mean your most recently saved item isn’t even on the first page of results.
fediverse
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.