Is there a way to derank certain magazines on user side? Something between full blocking and full allowing a magazine?

Some instances and groups are very chatty (*gestures to /lemmyshitposts), so much so that they dominate the All page.

I knew that there would be a point that browsing /all would no longer be a pleasant or feasible experience, but I quite liked having a pulse on what everyone in the (that kbin.social federates to, anyway) are thinking. But right now it seems @memes is dominating everything.

I don't want to fully block them from showing up in my feed, but i don't want to let them full send either. Would it be feasible to add a feature in future releases to be able to adjust the algorhythm on the user-side that would allow for mutes, or deranking it in your feed, instead of outright blocking it?

MoogleMaestro,
MoogleMaestro avatar

Perhaps it would be possible to make the all feed collapse posts that fall under the same community? Something like "x posted on somemagazine, with y other posts today" which would just link to the community?

I do agree that the memes have been fun but also it's kind of dominated my feed lately -- I've had to stick to /sub

Tomassci,
Tomassci avatar

I was speaking about this in another thread, but what I envisioned was some sort of "Also seen in.." thing that would show other communities that the same content was posted in. Like Reddit's "Discussions also in..." buttons, except visible from the frontpage.

curiosityLynx,

We could use the Reddit approach to Hot (in Reddit's equivalent to /sub):

  1. Show the hottest post
  2. Show the hottest post that isn't in a magazine from which a post was already shown
  3. Repeat step 2 until we've reached a minimum level of hotness
  4. Show the rest in order of hotness regardless of which magazine they came from

Ideally you'd replace Step 4 with something that recursively applies steps 1-3 to what's left over, but since Reddit doesn't do that, I assume it would be too computationally expensive.

tables,

This would be great, it would enable users to follow all of the communities they want to follow without having the bigger more active ones drown out the smaller ones.

dandan,
dandan avatar

Yeah, something in the algorithm that prevents one magazine or one instance dominating would be the best approach.

curiosityLynx,

My naive guess to how Reddit does it would be that they do two SQL commands that look something like this

WITH CTE AS (
    SELECT  *
           ,row_number() OVER(PARTITION BY magazine ORDER BY heat) AS row_num
    FROM    posts
)
SELECT   *
FROM    cte
WHERE   row_num = 1
ORDER BY heat;

followed by

SELECT *
FROM posts
WHERE id<> $IDs_of_previous_request
ORDER BY heat;
kglitch,

On kglitch.social, that memes community is set to nsfw, so it doesn't show up in /all. I'm on the verge of doing the same with a few more.

PabloDiscobar,
PabloDiscobar avatar

It's not just memes but also unrelated content to the magazine. There are spammers out there, hunting for quantity.

The short answer is probably: you can't. You say you don't want to block the mag, but how would you make the difference between useful posts and spam from the same mag? You can't, it's just too much content to sort out.

The only reason why we did not defederate was a lack of content. Once kbin.social is filled with enough users federation won't be necessary anymore and it will be seen as a way to introduce cheap content to prime newborn instances.

Can you tell the difference between lemmy.ml, beesomething and lemmyworld or the cohort of attempts at lemmysomehing? No. There isn't much difference. The idea was that instances would specialize into a theme but it did not happen. People want the mass. They want to be where the buzz happens.

Yes, in theory you can use any instance as a point of entry but in reality people want to join the biggest party. So the only difference between instances is mostly moderation. And somehow the initial link that people saw in their original community to find their new instance. Like many of us did with /r/redditmigration

This is all about sane default settings. If your instance allows everything and let you chose what you don't want to see then you are trapped into a whack-a-mole game against a million moles. You will lose your mind blocking stuff constantly.

Either

  • we defederate spammy instances, like you mentioned lemmy.world
  • we block a mag, and other mags from the same instance will popup anyway.

People won't have the patience to block the meme spammers. In short: the blacklist system we are using no cannot handle the increasing load of meh content, we have to use the whitelist method.

In the end it will come to a federation made of instances with the same moderation policy. It will work because this policy will enforce the best content possible and will attract the people looking for quality content. So the people complaining about "defederation being a fascist practice" will stay on the old global federation, nothing will be forced upon them, while other people looking for quality will silently leave for instances with better federation standards. The most motivated people will bootstrap the concept, probably people passionate with hardware or another hobby.

Lemmy.world won't be on their federation list. Too bad for them but it's their fault for creating an account on a spammy instance.

This state where everyone federates with everyone (except criminals) comes to an end. We will have many different federations, not a single one.

tables,

I don't think your answer addresses what the OP is talking about at all and it's getting kinda scary that the immediate answer to every small issue people have on the Fediverse seems to be defederation. People do love their echo chambers apparently.

I want to be federated with lemmy.ml and lemmy.world and etc and I'm fine that they're generic instances. They don't need to "specialize" and I don't even think that was the point. Maybe people assumed Kbin and Lemmy would follow the tracks of Mastodon where indeed some instances were created as specialized art or technology instances, but I don't even think that's really a great idea.

But I do agree that some communities are a lot more active than others - like meme communities - which leads their posts to drown out other smaller communities. I don't think the problem is the "quality of the content" - I don't want anyone controlling the "quality" of the content either, as long as it's within the rules, because that's just way too subjective - for example, you seem to think all meme accounts are spam, whereas I don't think they are at all - I think people are allowed to have fun.

What I want, and I think that's what the OP is talking about, is simply to have a way to slow down the posts from the more active communities - kinda like how Reddit didn't show you all of the content of a very active sub when you were on your main feed, but only the hottest threads, and you'd get a mix of threads from very big active subreddits and smaller more inactive subreddits. I love the LOTR meme communities, for example, but I don't want to see all of their posts on my main feed, since it drowns out discussions from other smaller communities. All we need for that is a limit to the amount of threads you can be shown from every community on your main feed.

I dislike the idea of "federations devoted to a topic" because they get boring really fast unless your whole personality centers around that single topic. I created an account on fosstodom once since I do contribute to FOSS and like seeing discussions about it, but eventually it got boring because, naturally, no one talked about anything other than software and people didn't engage on other topics - which is probably fine if software is the one and only thing you like having in your life, but I would dare say is not fine for most individuals with a balanced life and different hobbies.

PabloDiscobar,
PabloDiscobar avatar

I don't think your answer addresses what the OP is talking about at all and it's getting kinda scary that the immediate answer to every small issue people have on the Fediverse seems to be defederation. People do love their echo chambers apparently.

I did address the point. My conclusion is it cannot be done reliably by an automated system and that we have the choice of blocking manually or defederating.

What I want, and I think that's what the OP is talking about, is simply to have a way to slow down the posts from the more active communities - kinda like how Reddit didn't show you all of the content of a very active sub when you were on your main feed, but only the hottest threads, and you'd get a mix of threads from very big active subreddits and smaller more inactive subreddits. I love the LOTR meme communities, for example, but I don't want to see all of their posts on my main feed, since it drowns out discussions from other smaller communities. All we need for that is a limit to the amount of threads you can be shown from every community on your main feed.

Then I already mentioned why it cannot work reliably: "how would you make the difference between useful posts and spam from the same mag? You can't, it's just too much content to sort out."

So you want the insightful posts being hidden from a mag because someone else in the same mag spammed memes? Because that's what you will get. Sorry but I don't want that. I want to be out of this meme bubble. We are slowly encountering the same problem than reddit had.

I dislike the idea of "federations devoted to a topic"

Nope, I did not say "devoted to a topic". I said "In the end it will come to a federation made of instances with the same moderation policy."

I said "moderation policy", I didn't say "topic". I said that hobbyists would start the process, but they will probably federate with other hobbyists from other domain as long as they share the same moderation policy.

/all will soon become unusable anyway. It was great at the beginning, but the more people join and the more it will become unusable. You didn't really think that all instances would always be federated, right?

tables,

I did address the point. My conclusion is it cannot be done reliably by an automated system and that we have the choice of blocking manually or defederating.

Reddit did it fine.

So you want the insightful posts being hidden from a mag because someone else in the same mag spammed memes?

Mags should moderate themselves. Going back to the Reddit analogy, if a subreddit mixed memes and useful content, and I didn't want to see memes, I'd stop following that subreddit. That's why most informative subreddits usually banned memes. If I follow a meme subreddit though, I expect to see memes. I don't expect to see nothing just because someone else decided to defederate from every instance containing memes.

So you want the insightful posts being hidden from a mag because someone else in the same mag spammed memes? Because that's what you will get.

No, that wouldn't happen with my proposal.

Sorry but I don't want that.

Neither do I, but that's ironically what we'd both get if we followed your suggestion of defederating from "generic" instances. Most useful and informative communities I follow right now are on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world. If we defederate from them just because you don't want to click the block button a couple of times, we would both lose access to most informative communities in this space.

If, however, we simply filter some of the most active communities' content out, and enable users to keep blocking out stuff they don't want to see at all, you can get a good mix of all the content you follow, and you can still go directly to the communities in which you want to read every single thread and read every single thread. We could even have a /sub and a /filtered-sub, where in the first one you'd see aboslutely everything, and in the second one you'd have a Reddit style sub tab with a mix of content of the various communities you follow.

/all will soon become unusable anyway. It was great at the beginning, but the more people join and the more it will become unusable.

And that's fine IMO. /r/all was unusable on Reddit, too, and I think that's fine because it's not made for you or me. Some of my friends loved /r/all, though, and refused to use the sub only view. I think like on Reddit, /all is meant for people who want to see content from absolutely everything and like living in chaos, basically. I personally don't see the point of that, so I'd rather follow /sub. But I want /sub to have all of communities I follow, and not have most communities arbitrarily cut out because, again, you alone don't like memes.

PabloDiscobar,
PabloDiscobar avatar

Reddit did it fine.

Reddit has one unique instance only.

Reddit had moderation everywhere.

Still reddit is flooded by low effort content.

Mags should moderate themselves. Going back to the Reddit analogy, if a subreddit mixed memes and useful content, and I didn't want to see memes, I'd stop following that subreddit.

This is not reddit here. This is more like chaos. Reddit is an example of an instance completely defederated, with only one authority. You cannot expect the same here when you federate with everyone.

Neither do I, but that's ironically what we'd both get if we followed your suggestion of defederating from "generic" instances. Most useful and informative communities I follow right now are on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world. If we defederate from them just because you don't want to click the block button a couple of times, we would both lose access to most informative communities in this space.

No, they would probably post their useful information in a federation which promotes quality.

"just because you don't want to click the block button a couple of times"

As if I was the problem. We are only one month in. What do you think will happen in 6 months? Do you really believe that new users will follow your routine to block every sub posting trash? Of course they won't! They will follow the link to a federation that fit their style. Why not? What's the big fuss about federating with a select group of instance? Whats the drama about? I don't get it.

Every time someone mention defederation it's like we kicked a hornet's nest. People will run away from memes. And defederation is an adequate tool for this. You can stay if you want, other people will leave.

If, however, we simply filter some of the most active communities' content out, and enable users to keep blocking out stuff they don't want to see at all, you can get a good mix of all the content you follow, and you can still go directly to the communities in which you want to read every single thread and read every single thread. We could even have a /sub and a /filtered-sub, where in the first one you'd see aboslutely everything, and in the second one you'd have a Reddit style sub tab with a mix of content of the various communities you follow.

You won't win this race. Eventually people wanting quality will rejoin people wanting quality on another federation.

And that's fine IMO. /r/all was unusable on Reddit, too, and I think that's fine because it's not made for you or me. Some of my friends loved /r/all, though, and refused to use the sub only view. I think like on Reddit, /all is meant for people who want to see content from absolutely everything and like living in chaos, basically. I personally don't see the point of that, so I'd rather follow /sub. But I want /sub to have all of communities I follow, and not have most communities arbitrarily cut out because, again, you alone don't like memes.

Fine, you are welcome to stay with the meme enjoyers. It makes me wonder why you are not on reddit. If reddit "does it so well" why didn't you stay on reddit?

tables,

Fine, you are welcome to stay with the meme enjoyers. It makes me wonder why you are not on reddit. If reddit "does it so well" why didn't you stay on reddit?

I'd at least hope you were arguing in good faith, but you're obviously not. I pointed out specific features of Reddit which, in my opinion, worked fairly well, and I pointed out how they could work here as well. That doesn't mean I had any reason to stay in Reddit.

You've mostly deviated from the subject and assume that most people are exactly like you, hate memes and all "thrash" content - by your definition that everything you dislike is thrash. I disagree with that. I think most people like generalist topics, thus why they flow towards those communities.

Mastodon, having existed for longer, is a good example. The main generalist instances are far bigger than the specific tech or art ones. But, because they haven't defederated from each other, everyone can sit in their favourite instances, in which the local content most suits their tastes, but still interact with one another. You can go on fosstodom and mostly see FOSS related topics on the local view, while being able to interact with more generalist instances like mastodon.social at will. If fosstodon had defederated from mastodon.social, it likely would've lost many of its users as they'd probably not like being in an instance that forbids general content.

Being in an instance with people who share similar topics is fine. Defederating from general instances, though, just puts you in a small bubble. I don't understand why you reject that any other solution other than defederation might work when it has worked for Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.

PabloDiscobar,
PabloDiscobar avatar

I'd at least hope you were arguing in good faith, but you're obviously not

Can't you just say "I disagree with you" instead of accusing people of arguing in bad faith? What's so hard with explaining why you left reddit?

Being in an instance with people who share similar topics is fine. Defederating from general instances, though, just puts you in a small bubble.

Wow, what a colossal waste of time it was. I spent time explaining the thing and that's all I've got in return.

I don't understand why you reject that any other solution other than defederation might work when it has worked for Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.

The mass of content is different, the type of content is different. I don't know why you compare them. Reddit is the closest example of what we are aiming for and you refused to answer why you left reddit.

I'm done, I'm not spending more time with this.

quortez,
quortez avatar

What I want, and I think that's what the OP is talking about, is simply to have a way to slow down the posts from the more active communities - kinda like how Reddit didn't show you all of the content of a very active sub when you were on your main feed, but only the hottest threads, and you'd get a mix of threads from very big active subreddits and smaller more inactive subreddits. I love the LOTR meme communities, for example, but I don't want to see all of their posts on my main feed, since it drowns out discussions from other smaller communities.

Yes, this exactly.

Very_Bad_Janet, (edited )

I'm not so sure that people want to join the biggest party. I follow a lot of similarly named/themed magazines/communities because I don't want to miss interesting or informative content. The content i like might not get that much engagement (upvotes or boosts). I guess this is similar to what I followed on Reddit.

Right now kbin.social has the categories Subscribed and All (this is what I see on mobile). Maybe we need a Favorites category as well for the mags/comms we like the most.

I like to check out memes but there has been a flood of them. So I don't subscribe to those mags/comms because I know I will find them easily on the All queue regardless.

ETA: I love that there is no algorithm showing me more of what I've already engaged with or more of what it thinks I want. I like being exposed to new stuff that I didn't know I wanted to read about.

PabloDiscobar,
PabloDiscobar avatar

ETA: I love that there is no algorithm showing me more of what I've already engaged with or more of what it thinks I want. I like being exposed to new stuff that I didn't know I wanted to read about.

And the mass of this new content is memes and low effort. There is no miracle. It worked at first because of the people who joined initially, we left reddit for a reason. But some people are already feeling the crowd effect and the fediverse hasn't reached his maximum intensity yet, far from it. So expect the default fediverse federation to get worse and worse, because spammers want a public.

I see no other direction for the people who want quality content to create their own federation. Sure you can put some limiters here and there but the fundamental problem will remain. No one ever said that everyone should federate with everyone.

I think we should give it time and see how things go, but there will probably be a lot of changes on the federation thing.

McBinary,
McBinary avatar

I was just getting ready to post something like this as well. We need a way to put a 'slow-mode' on certain communities. I don't want to block them entirely because I enjoy them too, but at this point /all is literally all shitposts and memes. Even scrolling way down (infinite scroll) it's all memes all the way down.

I want to be able to discover other communities and engage and grow them, but we just can't see any of them with all the memes.

Very_Bad_Janet,

In Mastodon (I guess I use the official app, if there is one) there is a way, in my settings, to slow down the deluge of posts in the Federated Tineline feed. Maybe this would work for kbin?

daredevil,
daredevil avatar

I've been sorting by new and active for this, but agree with your sentiment

livus,
livus avatar

This is what I've been doing too. Sorting by new is pretty cool.

1chemistdown,
1chemistdown avatar

Good news, just like Reddit enhancement suite, kbin has kbin enhancement suite going. Why don’t you ask them if they can do this.

@enhancement

Prouvaire,
Prouvaire avatar

@1chemistdown @quortez

You may also want to consider requesting this as a feature for https://kbin.social/m/ArtemisApp

https://kbin.social/u/hariette is implementing a feature where your subs home page can be "sprinkled" with posts from communities you don't already follow. See:

https://kbin.social/m/ArtemisApp/t/173125/Artemis-is-experimenting-with-a-Discovery-Mode-for-your-feed

What you're asking for is a variation of that.

1chemistdown,
1chemistdown avatar

@Prouvaire

Yes, Hariette has been super responsive to the community. They’re a fan of Apollo and they’re trying to bring that same community interaction between users and their development of the app. Looking forward to it.

mack123,

Agreed, custom aggregators for kbin and the fedverse in general, will become a thing.

I can see a view that combines the hot posts from each of my subbed communities, with the top 1 or two posts from each featuring, filtering over a time constraint or some other ranking system.

A client side implementation would be possible, but expensive in api calls. Server side should be easier. Maybe even defining a query language of sorts that can be user customised, if we wanted to be really fancy.

Some form of weighted rank, combining activity and interaction. I am subbed to some slow communities that are just starting. Maybe having a post or two in 24 hours where I would want those posts to rank highest. Subbed fast paced communities would then rank lower if we factor frequency and interaction on a per community basis.

hariette,
hariette avatar

Going to see if I can spin out a community dampener based on the filter feature Artemis has already. Cause I'm so finding myself a bit tired of meme dominating so much heh.

artillect,
artillect avatar

It might be kinda hard to pull off, but I’ll see what I can do. I’m not sure if KES can be used to (easily) modify the post rankings, but I think randomly hiding them based on a factor you set could work well. So if you set it to 50% for @memes, it’ll hide half of the posts from there on average.

It’s not perfect, but I think it strikes the right balance between seeing every post and blocking it. I’m busy this weekend but I’ll create an issue on KES’s GitHub repo and someone might beat me to it.

PositiveNoise,
PositiveNoise avatar

That would be a totally fine workaround. So I guess the user would create a list of 'attenuated communities' or some such, and set a value for each.

e569668,
@e569668@fedia.io avatar

This might be a bad suggestion, but would it be possible to do something like mute community for x hours? So until now reaches a timestamp, hide posts from that community (sort of like discords mute channel for x hours). That way people could be like "I'm done with memes for now, but want to see them when I wake up"

WeRememberTheFreeman,

I’ve just blocked all memes communities for now. It was funny the first few times but it got old real quick.

InfiniteFlow,
@InfiniteFlow@lemmy.world avatar

I’m on Lemmy and feeling the same problem. Less active/smaller communities get drowned by the other, which will prevent them from growing as fewer people will come across them. A sort order that de-emphasizes some in the feed would be a great way to deal with it…

0xcafe,

I’ve got this problem as well. The best “solution” I’ve got so far is to sort by “New” and (optionally) ban shitpost communities.

Swyperider,
Swyperider avatar

If there is something that I can complement Reddit for, it's that the frontpage shows one or two hot posts from each of the subreddits you are subscribed to, instead of showing several from those that are more active than the quieter ones like what kbin does now.

Ragnell,
Ragnell avatar

It would be nice to be able to have a "Favorite communities" feed where we can go to see a set of communities we're subscribed to but like better than other subscriptions. Favorites leads to threads we've upvoted (on Kbin), though, so we'd need another name.

But that way you can be subscribed to the busy community, but still see the less busy communities on a feed.

wmrch,

It’s not even just shitposting communities. I subbed c/piracy out of curiosity and it just floods my frontpage. It’s really getting old at this point.

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