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 #threadiverse (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?

4 points

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…

permalink
report
reply
5 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

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

permalink
report
reply
8 points

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

permalink
report
reply
12 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

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”

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

@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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

@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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
17 points

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.

permalink
report
reply
8 points
*

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

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

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

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points
*

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?

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
*

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.

permalink
report
reply
12 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

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?

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points
*

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

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.

permalink
report
parent
reply

/kbin meta

!kbinMeta@kbin.social

Create post

Magazine dedicated to discussions about the kbin itself. Provide feedback, ask questions, suggest improvements, and engage in conversations related to the platform organization, policies, features, and community dynamics. ---- * Roadmap 2023 * m/kbinDevlog * m/kbinDesign

Community stats

  • 1

    Monthly active users

  • 653

    Posts

  • 5.5K

    Comments

Community moderators