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...:-)

[–] SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.world 11 points 8 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 0 points 8 months ago

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.

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