Also I’d love to be able to filter by entire instance (besides “global”, “local”, and “subscribed”, if we could add instances where we can only see content from that instance)
So that you don’t need to seek out “which instance isn’t federated with [instance I would wish to defederate from had I the ability]” and can instead simply click “block instance.” And could do this without hosting my own whole ass instance.
Say another NSFW instance pops up and gets really popular…but it’s only furry and futa, and a lot of it, and new communities all the time pop up for vore, and guro, etc. Sure, one can whack-a-community everytime one pops up if they don’t want that being prominent in their all tab, or they can just click “block instance” and keep it pushing. It isn’t something bad enough I feel I could (nor should) bother my instance admin about defederating, and if he disagreed with me I’d like to not have to create a whole new ass acct just to not see c/specificguro pop up on my shit after banning c/guro and c/leftguro, and I don’t want to block all NSFW because A) It isn’t always porn, that tag is sometimes used erroneously, and B) I’m cool with some titty, but cockvore is a little much.
Why would I, an individual, care about “defeating the purpose of a federation” when all I’m trying to do is cultivate a feed that only shows things that I’m interested in? If there’s an instance that only hosts things that I know I’m not interested in, why wouldn’t I at least want to have the option to block everything coming from that instance? It literally affects no one but me, why would you or anyone else care what I choose to see on my screen?
Personally, I’d love to see this feature just so I can block all instances that are in a different language from ones that I speak. It’s quite a task having to constantly block communities that only have things I can’t understand. That’s really not a task that I want to have to constantly maintain, and being able to choose to not see any current or future communities hosted on those servers would be a great timesaver for me.
Also, as another example, there’s one particular instance that is very welcoming to hate speech and ideas of violence towards people that aren’t like them. Not all communities in that instance are as open about it as others, but just a few minutes ago I clicked on a thread hosted on that instance and watched what I thought was an innocent comedy video. About halfway through I started noticing some subtle hate-speech that was being casually tossed in. I went back to the comments section to see what instance the video was hosted in, and sure enough, it was the one that I know of that allows for such content to flourish. So in that regard someone might block the more obvious hate communities, but then not notice the more subtle ones. And while I do appreciate the idea of the fediverse that I can choose to interact with those people if I want to, I personally have made the decision that I do not want to waste my time with literal haters, so I would love to have the option of blocking any and all current and future messages from anyone participating in that instance. It’s my choice. Why wouldn’t you want everyone to have that option even if you don’t want to make that decision yourself?
Instead of blocking stuff, why not just subscribe to everything you’re interested in and ignore “all”? That way nothing ever “pops up” since you’ll only get the list of communities you opted in to.
If I ignore all, how will I ever find things to subscribe to? Just search? How will I know what to search for? Am I just supposed to remember to look for new communities every single day? Every week? What if there’s a great community out there that uses a weird name that doesn’t come up in a search? What if I don’t think of something I like and I never think to search for it? What if there’s something I never knew I liked so I would have never searched for it to begin with? What if something interesting happens in a community that I would have never subscribed to but also wouldn’t have blocked?
It’s just immensely more difficult and time consuming to find all the things that I might be interested in rather than eliminate the few things that I’m not. That’s like saying why not just listen to the same 3 CDs I already know I like rather than put on a streaming service and skip the songs I don’t care for. You get so much more content and variety rather than just sticking with what you already know.
I use this directory, which works pretty well. I’ll subscribe to anything that looks interesting, then unsubscribe from the ones that end up not working out. On Reddit, I would just search, so hopefully the search improves so I don’t need an external resource.
And I personally just search every few weeks or when I want something specific.
What if something interesting happens
Then you miss out. I personally don’t have much FOMO, so it’s not a big deal for me. Most communities don’t have a lot of posts, so it’s not hard to get caught up if I’m late by a week or two.
I personally find that I skip over most content when I visit local or all, so it feels like a huge waste of time vs looking at my subscriptions. I don’t like a lot of the high volume communities (memes and other similar content), so for me, sifting through a ton of uninteresting (to me) content isn’t fun. I’d rather miss a few things than spend tons of time scrolling past things I dislike.
Everyone is different though, and it was just an honest question. If it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t work.
I think that’s at odds with community discovery on Lemmy + kbin as a whole, particularly as communities actively migrate over from reddit and stackexchange
Is it? I almost never looked at /r/all on Reddit, and most of my subreddit discovery was by searching for keywords. /r/all had such a poor signal to noise ratio (I’m not interested in memes) that it was functionally useless for me, and I feel the same way about Lemmy and stack exchange.
The only time I do anything like “all” on Lemmy is when I see all posts on my instance (or for stack exchange, a given site). I like to think my instance generally has a better signal to noise ratio than the larger instances, so it has some limited utility for me.
I know other people use Lemmy differently, so it was a serious question. It fits my needs well, so maybe it would work well for others.
That’s fair enough. I was under the impression that the all feed for Lemmy wasn’t designed to behave like Reddits one, and that communities had equal discoverability regardless of topic or content.
I’m at this stage where I don’t really know if my favorite tech communities have moved over yet, and to your point, I should really set aside some time to put out the relevant keywords of the ones that still come to mind. I get a pleasant surprise when I see an old favourite show up in all.
And whilst I do have very specific interests concerning sites like reddit (primarily tech food, pets, training), I am open to finding new things to be interested in, if that makes sense. I feel like the all feed on both Reddit and Lemmy has been helpful with that in the past. This is how I stumbled upon projects like qmk, coreboot, microg, super random stuff like that.
As an aside, I’m extremely thankful that Lemmy let’s you block communities at the account level at all. I don’t believe Reddit accommodated this, and I had to rely heavily on a third party mobile app for an ‘optimal’ experience
The lemmy feed has gotten better, and I think it’s intended to mimic Reddit’s feed somewhat, but it still seems to include a ton of posts from popular communities that seem to drown out the less popular ones.
So if you’re looking for new communities, all will probably not be a very efficient way to do it since you’ll need to sift through a ton of content from more popular communities (and your new niche community won’t be popular at the start).
Also, and I could be wrong on this, I think it only shows posts from communities your instance tracks. So if nobody on your instance has looked for a given community, it won’t appear in all unless it happens to be hosted on your instance. I haven’t verified that, just that’s how I expect it to work given how other things on Lemmy work.
So the better solution seems to be to use a directory like this one and search for communities that way. That’s what I do, and it seems pretty effective. I browse through that periodically and find interesting communities that way.
And yeah, it’s cool that lemmy let’s you do it, I just personally don’t find a ton of value there, at least not as this point. Maybe it’ll be more useful once communities have stabilized a bit more and the feed itself has matured. But for now, it just seems like a ton of noise to me.
Sometimes, you need to block whole instances. Would it make more sense to you if I said instead of porn they were right wing?
Furthermore, not everyone is you. Other people want to do different things sometimes. Just because you’re fine distrohopping around lemmy or being stuck blocking new communities like a game of whack-a-mole doesn’t mean everyone wants to do that. Mastodon has this feature, and they’re doing just fine with it, it won’t kill the federation to allow people one more cunt hair’s worth of control over the content they see.
I dislike censorship more than I dislike having to constantly see posts by tankies and nazis, but only barely. I don’t want to have to advocate for defederation from obvious loony instances if there’s a possibility to just block them individually. There’s just not a single user or community I am interested in reading the opinions of with @lemmygrad.ml in their handle - it’s a perfect heuristic. So why not allow me to use it?
There are hacky ways to do it through a frontend that can only block communities. Any time a post appears from that instance, automatically block the community and hide the post. I don’t know if jerboa would prefer to wait until a more elegant solution is possible and/or leave it to the user though.
If I built it, I would just filter it out as it comes in. So don’t send anything to the server, just hide stuff. That seems like the least surprising behavior.
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