RTR#29 Another boring update: Categories and bug fixes

Today, I wanted to introduce you to Categories - a new feature that is essentially a multi-mags view. A new tab will appear in the user panel where you can create categories (public or private) and then add magazines to them (local or remote). In the magazine listing, there will be another tab that will list public categories created by users (which can be liked - in the future, this will transform into a subscription form). In the category view, all filters and sorting options are applied, and it also collaborates with the Aggregate view.

Additionally, I've patched several annoying bugs - media preview from comments by clicking the icon, improved navigation in the aggregate view, remote magazine listing in the content submission form, and a few others.

These changes will be implemented on the instance tonight. With this note, I conclude the month, and starting tomorrow, I'll be 100% focused on developing the new ActivityPub module and matters related to instance moderation.

You can track changes in the official repository
https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core

or on Github
https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin

ernest,
ernest avatar

https://kbin.social/magazines/collections 🎉

box464,
@box464@mastodon.social avatar

@ernest oooooh.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568,
ThatOneKirbyMain2568 avatar

>announces categories
>announces fixes to a bunch of prominent bugs
>claims the update is boring
>leaves

EDIT: In all seriousness, this stuff all seems great! I think "collections" would be a better name than categories though.

Armaell,

Boring update containing the feature I wanted the most and the fix that was the most annoying.
Yeah, soo boring.

ernest,
ernest avatar

You're right, 'collections' is definitely a better name for it! Changed ;-)

ADHDefy,
ADHDefy avatar

lol I had the same thought. This was one of my most wanted features! Idk if Artemis is still being worked on at this point, but I hope support for collections is added there.

DuncanMSussexPol,
@DuncanMSussexPol@toot.community avatar

@ernest nice! One of the biggest problems I found with KBin/Lemmy was the duplication of very similar communities across them. This goes a long way to fixing that!

donuts,
donuts avatar

Collections are a game-changing feature, imo! Nice work to all involved.

daredevil,
daredevil avatar

I did not expect to see the / feature be implemented so quickly after mentioning it in only two threads ago. It's really exciting watching develop. However, when I tried making a private and public test case, both returned with 50x error. Even though some actions are successful despite showing this error, I couldn't find my attempts at using this feature under Settings > Collections or Magazines > Collections. Regardless, your work is certainly appreciated.

ernest,
ernest avatar

It should work now ;-)

daredevil, (edited )
daredevil avatar

Incredible. I can confirm it works now.

edit: I was going to make a public for , but you beat me to it. :)

Interested folks should favorite this below for a streamlined view of @kbindevlog and @kbinmeta

https://kbin.social/u/ernest/c/kbin

ContentConsumer9999, (edited )

Another banger update! I can't tell you how convenient it is to have that media preview bug fixed. It was starting to get annoying to randomly have words missing. Are you planning to create an official Kbin category?
Edit: Seems like it's already been made. Here's a link for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

leadore,
leadore avatar

I feel stupid, is this currently available? It seems yes, some people say they've made one, but I can't seem to find either a "Categories" or "Collections" option. Sorry, I don't know which area is called the "user panel", but I've looked at the tabs across the top, and in all the menus (+, channels, profile).

I did see the collections tab on the Magazines page though, and I see Random Collections in the right side panel, just can't find where to create my own category/collection.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568,
ThatOneKirbyMain2568 avatar

Go to settings and click the collections tab. Tbh, it feels a bit hidden rn, and I'd love to see at least some sort of link on the Magazines page in the future.

leadore,
leadore avatar

Thanks but I looked in Settings. There aren't what I would call "tabs" there, but there are different sections (General, Sub channel, Threads, etc) but nothing called Collections.

WAIT, never mind, I found it in the other "settings" I forgot there are two different places for Settings. Thank you

ADHDefy,
ADHDefy avatar

@ernest, you are doing amazing work! I hope you're taking care of yourself, too. :)

In a future update, do you think you could add the ability to set a default sort? I prefer to set my home feed to Top, 1 Day, and it's easy enough to just bookmark https://kbin.social/sub/top/1d on my PC, but I primarily use kbin as a PWA on Android and AFAIK, there's no way to set a custom home page. It would also just be convenient to open kbin to my preferred sort on any platform. :)

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

Will there be a way for communities to opt-out from being listed in a category?

I think there is a lot of abuse potential in this and even if well intended, a single word or so can’t really describe what communities are about, and as a result those categories (similar to the “all” feed) will bring a lot of off-topic comments and trolling from people not engaged with the communities at all otherwise.

On Mastodon with hashtags the original poster can at least make a conscious choice of being listed under it or not. But this seems fully third party driven and I fear it will increase moderation workload significantly.

ernest,
ernest avatar

I don't understand how content grouping can be used for potential abuses, to be honest. Collections are related to the user, so it will be subject to instance moderation in case of such an attempt. The community can also switch to private mode - then this content will not be aggregated in collections. Moreover, from what I know, there are already external tools that do similar things.

poVoq, (edited )
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

Most trolling and brigading is fairly low effort, and having a sharable collection of communities to troll makes it much easier to organize lots of people to do just that. Edit: yes external tools for that exist but having it built in makes it much easier to abuse and rope in people to do the trolling that otherwise would not bother.

But my main concern is that this isn’t opt-in for communities. Having a sharable and subscribable link with for example “meme” communities means that all of them are seeing a constant barrage of random people commenting that are not members of that community and do not have any idea what the community is about other than that it is somewhat loosely related to “memes”. It basically hides everything that is vital about the communities and actively damages attempts at community building.

Edit: my concern is mainly about public, sharable collections, if people want to make their own private collections that seems like a nice feature to have.

ernest,
ernest avatar

I understand now, I'll think it over during the weekend. I haven't really considered it before because the fediverse is still a relatively small and close-knit community imo. Excluding a specific instance would likely involve PR proposal to Lemmy's repository, but that's fine. Thanks for the feedback.

ContentConsumer9999,

Will collections get a way to tag them like magazines?

ernest,
ernest avatar

Additional options will probably be introduced in the near future, but for now, I need to attend to other matters ;)

livus, (edited )
livus avatar

@ernest I just made one! Thank you, this is super super cool. Least boring update ever!

Small issue: I can't get it to let me add @world. It just adds more and more options that end in .world and if I manually type it, it won't add. Might be because I'm on mobile.

Solved. I just have to be more patient and let it search more before I scroll.

VerifiablyMrWonka,
VerifiablyMrWonka avatar

Knocking it out of the park!

gibandaley,
gibandaley avatar

Awesome! Multireddit like functionality was what I was missing most, and Categories sounds like it will replace it nicely. Thanks!

Teppic,
Teppic avatar

I think it complements federation too. Suddenly you can have a collection of magazines sharing a name/topic from different instances all listed together in one place. That's really quite cool!

livus,
livus avatar

I agree. This is really harnessing the power of federation!

testing,
testing avatar

@ernest
you are so fast! how do you do that?

ernest,
ernest avatar

This is just a prototype, there will probably be some errors to fix ;-) But I want to see how it performs in practice and over time, I will refine the whole thing, and that will take a bit more time.

gibandaley,
gibandaley avatar

Yeah, I favorited my private collection (not sure why I did that...) and it seems to have permanently made it public, no big deal in this case, but I feel bad 'squatting' on collection slug.

ernest,
ernest avatar

Actually, I named it incorrectly. I treated as private collections those that don't appear in the listing, but you can still share them with friends. I changed it so that they are truly private, and I will add another status someday - non-public.

gibandaley,
gibandaley avatar

Thanks! Looks like logged out the collection isn't accessible at kbin.social/c/collection-name anymore which is excellent, but is still accessible there when logged in (unexpected, though perhaps only accessible to my account, but I feel bad I might be squatting on a nice collection name) and is also accessible at kbin.social/u/gibandaley/c/collection-name (expected)

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