Hi! I’m Lohrun, I run the Kbin instance on fediverse.boo

Consider buying me a coffee to help keep the lights on in the server room! https://bmc.link/lohrun

  • 0 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 12th, 2023

help-circle




  • I notice myself checking it less and less due to the post sorting algorithm being infuriating. E.g. I’m sorting by “Top 6 Hours” and this post from 7 months ago is in my feed

    Edit: and since I’ve now commented on this post, it’ll likely bubble into other people’s feeds and they’ll be just as confused as I was






  • Wow I appreciate the lengthy response! So where do we go from here? Do we need to add new features that make content more discoverable? Do we need some great sorting algorithm here? Do we need a 3rd party tool that scrapes the fediverse and tells us what we might like? I’m trying to answer a bunch of questions like this. I’ve been messing with ActivityPub in my spare time to see what my implementation of it would look like. I think I have some ideas that could solve some of the issues we are seeing pop up. Honestly I’d love to have some people help me brainstorm features and architect out a system. At the end of the day… I’m on the fediverse because I don’t like Facebook, twitter, instagram, and (now) Reddit. It’s not just the people and the content on those platforms I didn’t enjoy, it’s also how they wanted you to interact with the content. I’m not looking to build a platform clone, I’m looking to build something that can fully utilize ActivityPub and can provide a feature rich experience to the user. Maybe I have too lofty of goals…idk, let me know!


  • That doesn’t seem impossible… I’m not sure what business logic would be needed to make them easily interoperable. Honestly the biggest complaints I’ve read about the fediverse isn’t the UIs available to view content. The issue is the bugginess of federation and the lack of content recommendation algorithms on the platforms.

    I’ve been mulling over the idea of a fediverse content crawler to allow instances to mass federate content to their instance…but then like I said you also need a good recommendation algo as well.

    We have a ton of dev work going into making new UIs for Lemmy but personally I think what I said above should get some love too.





  • Oh I wish we had the ability to fully delete our content that we’ve posted or that someone has posted of us. Illegal content is a huge concern with federation. As soon as someone pushes something like that, it gets sent to all the federated instances so they have a copy as well. That is a huge concern for instance owners (and honestly the fediverse as a whole).

    I run a kbin instance and I’m a software developer for my day job. I honestly don’t have a great answer for “how do we ensure the data we request be deleted on the fediverse is actually deleted.” My best solution would for us to have several federated master databases that we maintain our federated content with. If there is a big delete flag for some content then the child instances will follow suit.


  • It’s no different than me sending an email to someone and then sending a request to delete it. There likely is still a copy on the email provider’s server and the recipient could have potentially backed up their emails to something outside of the email ecosystem.

    Unfortunately the only way to be absolutely sure that there isn’t information you don’t want on the internet is to not share it at all. There will always be an issue of making sure every system actually deletes content when you request it. Like I said, that doesn’t stop anyone from backing up the data to another system. (E.g. Reddit archives from 2005 to now are available to download, even content that has already been deleted)


  • Yup! You can also subscribe to users and specific domains posted on an instance as well:

    https://fediverse.boo/rss?magazine=news
    https://fediverse.boo/rss?domain=bbc.com
    https://fediverse.boo/rss?user=lohrun
    
    

    So the first link would give you an RSS feed of my news magazine, the second link would give you an rss feed of any post from my instance that had bbc.com linked as the main post article, and the third link is an rss feed of all the stuff I post as a user.

    Obviously it doesn’t have to be my instance you use either, you can also do https://kbin.social/rss?magazine=news for other instances as well! I’m not sure if lemmy has rss support though. It’s kind of a cool “hidden feature” that you can use to curate a RSS feed off of already curated content.