Hi all,

Quiblr now has personalized post feeds for Lemmy!

I haven’t seen a “recommended feed” feature anywhere else in the fediverse but I thought I would take a crack at building it!

My goal was to make a privacy-focused recommendation engine that tailors your experience based on the content you interact with. None of the data leaves your device. You don’t even need to log in for it to work

  • You can turn it off or tune your feed in the settings
  • Each post now also includes a show me more/less button

I would LOVE feedback from folks if you get a chance to try it out!

This was really fun to build so let me know if there are any questions!

PS: Let me know if someone else has built this feature for the fediverse - then I will change the title to not claim “the first” lol

  • drspod@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    This is great! Some feedback on UI:

    • The first thing I did was click ⇩ on a post and it prompted me to log-in. This is confusing because I thought I could train the recommender without having to log-in. It took me a minute to find the “Like/Dislike” buttons because they require an extra click to open the post menu. Maybe make the Like/Dislike a bit more prominent and accessible, and find a way to differentiate between the controls for training the recommender and the upvote/downvote actions on the post itself. Or even better, make them the same thing so there’s only one pair of controls and if you’re not logged-in then upvoting just boosts the recommendation but doesn’t actually send the upvote action to the post.
    • Please use actual links (<a href=""></a>) for post navigation so that I can tell my browser to open a link in a new tab. Usually I middle-click to do this (in Firefox) but since the post title and content only respond to javascript events, I can’t middle click to open in a new tab. Clicking the post opens it in the same window.
    • Add text content of posts, or at least a button to expand the text content. Right now text posts are just the post title and I have to click through to read the content.
    • Add alt-text (tooltips) to your buttons. I know what the standard share/bookmark icons look like but it helps to have tooltips to be sure.
    • Add a link to open the original post (on the origin server). Every fediverse UI has this. If you have it too, I couldn’t find it.
    • Allow me to see (and drag) the scrollbar of the main content frame.
    • Add a refresh button (maybe at the top of the feed) so that I can generate more recommended content without having to actually reload the page in the browser.
    • When clicking a community name, I get the community page but I can’t press the back button to go back to the feed.
    • If I “dislike” a post, I don’t expect to see it again after a refresh, or ever.

    Also, it’s a bit late to change it now, but the name is very 2009-internet-startup.

    • Aurelius@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      Lots of great feedback. I’ll try to address each:

      • I tried to differentiate voting vs. “like/dislike” for the algorithm as to not confuse users who think they are logged in. I can put more thought into how to make this a bit more intuitive
      • Quiblr is built as a progress web app (PWA) so it uses native app components. The benefit is that it is faster and easier to manage multiple code bases. But the con is that it doesn’t have all the same benefits as HTML. I added an “open posts in new tab” feature in the settings
      • I like the idea of added more body text in the post itself. My fear was that it would make the feed look too crowded, but I can take second look at it
      • I love the tooltips idea
      • The 3 dot ellipses has a Post Detail section for each post. Maybe this could be a good place to add the link back to the original Instance url.
      • I like the scrollbar idea. I think this could make sense as an optional setting because I personally don’t prefer the scroll bar but I want to include it for users who do prefer it
      • I added a refresh button for users using the PWA version (since they don’t have a refresh button in the browser). Maybe something like “pull down to refresh” could work on
      • You should be able to press the “<” back button when viewing a community on mobile or just back in your browser. Both should take you back to your feed. Let me know if it isn’t working as intended
      • I’ll have to see the API allows for removing downvoted items from feeds. I can try to get creative if needed

      Edit: Added tooltips for post buttons + original url on the Post Detail page. I will continue to update this comment as I work through other additions in this list