(this is a bit of a rant, i’m sorry)

what in particular do you mean by lack of discoverability?

like, i want to see posts from communities that i already subscribed to, but because there’s more than 1000 communities on the fediverse and i’m only subscribed to a small countable subset of them, i inevitably lose out on a lot of content. (The “all” feed sucks unfortunately). So how to solve this?

The lack of discoverability is non-starter for many.

The Fediverse significantly lacks behind on the Content Discoverability technology.

I guess this is because there was a loud public outcry in the last 20 years that whoever makes your feed (this is called an “recommendation algorithm” or abbreviated “the algorithm”) has a lot of political power to decide what you see and what you don’t see, and that’s frowned upon. Because everybody that has power over what you see and what you don’t see is bad. That is why nobody wanted to provide an recommendation algorithm for the fediverse, because they would expose themselves to wild accusations. There should be an open-source recommendation algorithm, though; I’m sure of it.

  • Dessalines@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    @[email protected] brought up https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5871 , which would at least be a way for communities to explicitly link to each other, and we could possibly create a superset of Subscribed.

    In 1.0 there is the Suggested filter, where admins have a preset / chosen list of curated communities they like, and a way to view all the posts from them.

    I’d rather not do complicated algorithms to try to figure out interest / community adjacency based on user activity, as this could get really complicated and also probably show things people don’t want to see.

    I totally agree that content discovery could be better, but I’d like it to be explicitly chosen by the user, rather than generated. So I think the best way is still just to go to the communities page, and click subscribe on anything that might potentially interest you.

    • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.deOPEnglish
      1·
      12 hours ago

      I’d rather not do complicated algorithms to try to figure out interest / community adjacency based on user activity, as this could get really complicated

      I agree that per-user recommendations could easily get out-of-hand in terms of computational expense and probably also it would be a bit intransparent if the algorithm is really complicated, which would undermine user trust.

      I do think that maybe having a few explicitely-defined feeds/lists would be better than trying to dynamically and implicitely generate a list for each user.

      So instead of having a “suggested for you (personally)” feed for each user, there could be a few large feeds like /feed/technology, /feed/science, /feed/events_you_can_attend_in_germany, … that people can view.

      I’m not sure how computationally expensive such a feed would be. I imagine each feed is defined by a small text file that might look like this: (example feed_science.txt hosted on mander.xyz)

      /c/science@mander.xyz
/c/publichealth@mander.xyz
/c/mycology@mander.xyz
...

      And then the server can re-generate a cached version of the feed every 10 minutes. That is then served to each user who accesses /feed/[email protected] . In this way, the feed only needs to be generated once every 10 minutes and is then served out to all users that want to view it. That means that feed-generation time is independent of number of viewers.