I don't know what everyone means when they use 'rule' in the title and at this point I'm too afraid to ask. Please enlighten me.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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The very first community I blocked - let those who enjoy it do so but I do not. Unfortunately, the Fediverse shows you everything by default rather than things that you more or less want to, so blocking communities lacks the negative implications here that like blocking someone's phone or email address would elsewhere. So like if you want to block sports, you have to do so for every single team, league, and even type, plus all the new communities that continue to be made in the future. This is just the Fediverse's normal.
My blocked list is so long it's probably worth something.
I highly notice its' absence, whenever I visit my old Kbin or discuss.online accounts, and I see all these posts for sports, gaming stuff like Switch that I don't own, individual areas like in Canada and Australia and USA and UK - even if I lived in one I definitely do not live in them all:-) - and just stuff in general that fills up my entire scroll list with things that make reading it no fun and demotivating to have to decide individually on each one to skip.
And we all - well, apparently "only" 99.98% of us - are this way:-). That's why one day I hope to see more general tools to deal with this stuff, e.g. if I specify that I don't want updates for "sports" then unless I specifically subscribe to a community, it will hide even newly created communities from me that fall into that category. One day...:-)
Subscribe to communities and use home instead of all.
If you’re in “all” you are or course going to get “all” anything less would be censorship.
But then you only get, like, 5 posts a day.
What I would really like is having a combination between 'all' and 'subscribed' where it shows 'all' posts, but then my subscribed communities get a sort of amplification so they are more likely to appear in my feed, even if posts in my subscribed communities may not get much engagement.
An important - crucial - clarification is that it is not community censorship aka prohibition of a topic deemed offensive in some manner, it is rather self-censorship aka controlling one's own method of personal discourse. The latter is such an enormously different thing that most people don't even lump it together in their minds with the implications that come up when you say the word "censorship", which implies solely the former.
I do the same thing with my personal cellphone number and email address btw - I control who I answer, though I do not "censor" who is allowed to send a message to me. As do we all. The same goes with TV programs, and almost literally every website that either of us has ever been to (unless we go to... those places, though notably they lie off the beaten path for a reason...).
If you want to use solely your Subscribed feed, then I am not stopping you - why would I want to censor you or remove any capabilities from you in any way? Or anyone else for that matter?
I am talking about making All more usable, rather than virtually useless, especially as the Fediverse expands further, and community tastes become more diverse. Right now, you can log out or use an alternate account to view a version of the All feed that includes communities that you have blocked, so obtaining that level of functionality is super easy (as some might say, barely an inconvenience:-P), but the converse is not true: it takes HOURS of effort to try to curate the All feed to something that more closely resembles your interests, without being as rigidly locked-down as your Subscribed feed.
To give a personal example: I blocked the Docker communities, knowing that I can always choose to visit them at any time later whenever I want (again, while logged out, with a different account, or by removing the block), though I have subscribed to generic Linux communities, and yet I have done neither for self-hosting ones. This gives me a tripartite level of control in-between "All" vs. "None", where I can choose, if I want, to see those posts at some lower frequency than "always/100%" yet still see them.
Which reminds me, I have described in some other reply how my thoughts on an implementation strategy could involve both adding new communities to your Subscribed feed, without you having to manually add each new one that comes along, and also remove new communities from your Blocked list, in like manner; yet an alternate implementation could rather be a new sorting method or new feed, that takes your weighted suggestions into account e.g. shows highly-ranked sports posts at only 1% frequency, here too providing a new option somewhere in-between 100% and 0%.
That sounds nice to me:-). Options are good. This is Lemmy - we can git gud, if we want! And others can choose to ignore these new options, if they want.
You could do more than hope. A start could be just making lists, categorizing common communities. At least with that, someone could just go through and block or sub to all the coms within a category. No specialized knowledge needed.
I have a start to that, in the form of my block list:-). Of course it is highly tuned to my personal interests, and does not do full "categorization" beyond merely "is in said list" vs. "is not in said list", plus it only helps me personally rather than e.g. someone fleeing Reddit due to their continual messes. In that way it is like recommending a book to someone, vs. making the entire Dewey Decimal or other system to classify books in a manner that makes retrieval easier for other people.
Moreover, I think the main part would be to allow community self-selection - e.g. if I call something by a term, that is me putting that label onto them, while if they choose it for themselves it seems much more friendly?
Anyway, I thought lists of communities were already widely available? The trick might rather be to keep them maintained - e.g. to open up a wiki page, except that starts to involve who will host it, and like everything else Fediverse-related, who will fight off the hostile actors who keep uploading CP to it? (see e.g. this post describing yet another instance closing b/c of such attacks)
These matters are not so "simple" - e.g. would a far-right community be "heroes" or "genocidal terrorists", or both depending on who you ask? In my own personal block list, I get to make my own determinations (bonus: at a low-resolution level of merely "see" vs. "not see" such content, without having to think any more about it!:-P), but attempting to go beyond that... really does require some consensus-building skills. OR we could hope for UI tools that allow people to choose their own personal preferred method of accessing content across the Fediverse, which side-steps all that and keeps it at the level of unique, personal preferences.
The detraction is that if too rigidly applied, it creates echo chambers. On the other hand, please feel free to look at all the CP, pics of food, and descriptions of sportsting that you like, yet *I* do not want to waste my time with such, and if the only choices are "All" or "None", then I want the option to choose the latter, at least sometimes. I would presume that others think likewise.