OpenStars

Algorithms, great idea, horrible in practice.

Tbf, it is not the computer's fault - someone made it do that, and that same someone is the type to call a landline phone just as you sit down to family dinner (Leave It To Beaver style - at least I assume they did that in that show:-), or to literally knock on your literal door and try to sell you a vacuum cleaner or whatever - i.e. it is pure human greed, and the algorithm is just their latest tool in the toolbox to accomplish that.

Anyway, algorithms can be used for good too, if we wanted them to. Asimov for instance prompted three laws of robotics including foremost among them that robots would be allowed to do no harm - which is itself and interesting proposition bc like how else would a doctor perform surgery if it couldn't cut into a patient, or like what if a robot absolutely refuses to allow humans to commit suicide, or even to die in any way despite having lived for thousands (millions?) of years already? (It would become pure torture at some point!) To do a good or evil act, something needs to have "agency", but right now algorithms are purely tools to reach some externally defined end.

The SEC got its funding slashed by Trump - are they like the IRS now where they don't have the resources to truly do the job anymore?

Sorry, I iz too dum-dumz to understand this - want to walk me through it? Murder of the affairs (the thing, genitive... plural?) => Death of the heart?

I feel the need to be pedantic here: that quote continues on to the very next (and final) sentence being:

Not something that can be done with a simple plugin.

However, anything that is logically possible, is doable, with enough effort & investment - e.g. that infamous quote:

All that quote means is that it would be most simple to do as a back-end task, not a simple front-end one (though even a front-end could, in theory, e.g. slurp up 1000 posts and then use some metric to figure out how to display the most proper subset of 20 from that superset).

But for instance, someone could spin up their own instance, and then add whatever sorting method they wanted to it. However, recall again what happened to DMV.social - anyone who opens up a Lemmy server will be spammed with CSAM, it would seem - so there are other more urgent matters to be attended to first, unless that someone used it purely as a testbed, and made all connections to it to be read-only, or else had a team of moderators willing to put in large amounts of time to fend off those attacks with both manual efforts and also developing automated tools at the same time - e.g. they would need to have technical skill even just to moderate, much less administer the machine (unless, like existing Lemmys, there is a whole team of admins doing the technical parts already). Anyway, I don't suggest this lightly like it is trivially easy, just to say that it is possible.

It would be beneficial to talk more about these desirable features to ensure that when developers do invest time in them, we’ve already come up with a good and robust solution.

Sure, I am not trying to tell you what to do. Just stating that until and unless someone is willing to tinker with actual implementations - and again, right now their attentions seem to be directed elsewhere, plus while Scaled-sorting Hot may not be perfect it is something (I don't personally have experience to say if it is better than before b/c I was on Kbin.Social at the time which was totally different - but I thought I heard many people say that it is better now?) - then it is going to be a purely theoretical discussion. Which is probably how Scaled sort got implemented too? Though now that it is built, it could be tinkered with, if there is the will to do so.

But unless you are offering to do any of the actual implementation work yourself, I think you would need to discuss this with the actual admins who you would expect to do that work for you - hence you might try Matrix where they hang out, rather than solely discussing it here.

And then, as you said in your OP, when they say "no" and close all GitHub issues, that, as they say, is that. You can't "force" someone to do work for you for free - and even if you were offering money, or perhaps offering to do all the "design" work yourself for free, they still would need to agree to actually do the implementation.

Moreover, even if you DID offer to do ALL of the implementation work entirely on your own, unless you do want to spin up your own instance to actually run it on, you still would need the buy-in of the instance admins, for which having the buy-in of the developers would go a LONG way.

So you asked:

Do you have any ideas or suggestions on how Lemmy could better surface content from smaller communities?

And my suggestion is that you cannot walk into someone else's house and tell them how they should do things. Especially when they have ALREADY said no. They know better what their prioritization is, and what they hope to accomplish over the next month, year, and so on. The absolute beauty of the Fediverse is that you can take all of the existing Lemmy code, which is entirely functional, make a fork of it, and spin up your own instance - and not just run it, but even modify the code to do... whatever you want! And then you can share that code, and benefit all the instances that are running Lemmy too! Discuss.Online, Lemmy.World - all of them, well, those that choose to keep your suggestions, though it is up to each one individually to either accept or reject them, and it is ultimately their call. Reddit does not work this way, nor FaceBook/Meta/Threads, Instagram, Xhitter, etc., but we do, b/c it is "open-source". The caveat to that being... that someone, somewhere, must put in the actual effort to get it done.

And the people who would normally do that, seem to have said no. I gather that you feel frustrated but... it is what it is. Therefore, of what use is it to talk about any of this, when there is no path forward for it? THAT is how to move forward your ideas: either find or become someone yourself who can implement them, and THEN in talking to them you will actually be in an even better position to understand how it all works, and how it might be changed to work even better than it does now.

I dunno, perhaps I should not have replied at all? Sometimes I do overshare my thoughts and if you disliked that here then I apologize:-). It was my hope to help spur your thoughts along these lines that I was thinking, since it seems to me to be the only way forward. But I guess please ignore me if you think I am wrong, and I wish you luck either way!:-)

Fwiw, I do agree that eventually, when the developers are ready to move forward with this again, they indeed might appreciate a ready-made solution if one happened to be already available by then, but again that assumes that one could be made purely on theoretical grounds alone?

Thank you for explaining this.

I don't know what some people were assuming that I meant, but ofc I mean that I was browsing the "All" feed (what else could I have meant? well, I suppose "New" also, and ngl I do switch back and forth between those two, though spend >98% of my time on "All"), and that I wanted something in-between having to subscribe to each and every single thing individually, vs. EVERYTHING (with like a ton of sports, it used to be a bunch of foreign-language communities - which is... fine, I don't begrudge most any non-illegal community its entire existence? - and cooking, etc.).

My own "Local" barely has anything, so perhaps that is a source of bias - StarTrek.Online has roughly 2 posts per day, if that; and Discuss.Online where I was previously was the same; and Kbin.Social where I was before that literally has no Local mode at all iirc!

Anyway, to clarify, what I want is to start with inclusivity, then begin narrowing it down a bit - and all the better would be to use a toggle rather than a full ban, or even just limit the frequency of things so that e.g. I do not see 4 different posts about cooking from 4 different cooking communities in a row, followed by 4 different sports, followed by knitting, followed by... well, anyway, I just am not interested in scrolling endlessly to find even one thing that interests me, that way. This way I actually find TONS more posts than starting with exclusivity and trying to work upwards from that. (ironically, at the same time, it also misses many posts compared to visiting each community itself, but they tend to be the lowest-upvoted and commented-on ones; so anyway, it is what it is)

But for some reason, most people here that are choosing to respond are arguing against that, citing how it "won't work" (I mean... I already do it, literally daily, and have been for months?), as if I am somehow trying to take something away from them, somehow, but I am just talking about curating my own personal feed, which works for me, until we can get something better going on.

Also, there is the potential to be even more inclusive if the user has stipulated that they have a particular preference, when a community is new and struggles to gain acceptance in the wider Fediverse, the way that I am talking about. e.g. if someone says that they enjoy sports, and a new baseball community emerges, then it could be helpful to show up less often for people that do not like sports at all, but conversely more often for people who have indicated that they do - even if they have not subscribed to it yet. Sort of like how targeted ads work, except not being driven by seeking profits, and instead seeking out a genuine connection between a user and what content type they have asked to be notified about.

Well, it's fun to dream. :-)

Step 1: it would be nice if we could at least talk about this in a friendly & civilized manner. I have spent a portion of my day today trying to defend even so much as casually mentioning in passing - in a reply to a reply to a reply even, iirc, much less a full-on post - that I would like something similar to what you said. I give up whenever I detect that someone literally did not read what I already wrote, at which point I see that they just wanted to complain rather than add something of substance to the ongoing conversation. And even if we took it for granted that I was a dummy Mc-Stoopid-buttface, nobody bothered once to explain why I might be wrong.

i.e., there seems to be significant push-back to this approach. I have no idea why though - it seems entirely logical and do-able to me? Especially if it were purely optional, like a new sort option rather than taking over the existing Hot one? At a guess, it may just be a difficult task, so it awaits someone to be interested enough to actually implement it. Also, please remember that the entire Fediverse has and continues to be under perpetual attack (message from DMV.social closing down due to being spammed by illegal CP & CSAM amid concerns over the ethical considerations of being a server that allows posts from external users, i.e. the entire Federation model, quoting: "Quite frankly, this is disturbing and I just don’t want to deal with the possibility of this crap.") - I do not know if it is Huffman, or Musk, or Zuckerberg, or whoever might not enjoy how this could potentially take away from their profits, but they are correct that if we continue to exist on our own, that we need to do something to protect ourselves against this type of thing. So... sorting is important yes, but I could see if it was not the HIGHEST priority, right now.

But moving on, one thought regarding it: allow each user their own customization filters for each "category" of posts, e.g. 1% politics, 2% sports, restrict news to 5% (though the latter requires significantly deeper thinking to implement - e.g. is an article in a Technology sub still "news"? tbh, "news" is probably not a real category then). Or, as you say, an algorithm that would just work mostly fine for most people. The problem with all of this being that tags would have to exist first, so someone would have to develop that before any of this could begin to be developed and tested.

Which brings us back to: it is really fun to talk about such matters, but ultimately it will take someone rolling up their sleeves first, maybe learning an entirely new language (or several - according to this GitHub page, Lemmy is: "Rust 76.4% PLpgSQL 16.4% TypeScript 5.5% Shell 1.5% Other 0.2%"), and just getting something done. Otherwise, beggars cannot also be choosers, if there is nothing else available to choose from.

Exactly. The community could partner with the user to enhance findability - e.g. a community could label itself with the "hockey" tag, and if the user clicks somewhere they could see all the communities that likewise have that "hockey" tag, and just like the language function, include or exclude all of them in one group rather than having to do so individually. No "censorship" by external agencies need apply, and anyway this could be entirely optional to the user who could continue to exist entirely in the absence of such a thing.

Um... congrats, I guess?

Though there are still location-specific communities on lemmy.ml, e.g. !india@lemmy.ml, that you may or may not enjoy wanting to curate into or out of your various feeds.

But I am not trying to tell you how to live your life? I am just answering your question irt the fact that such posts do exist across the Fediverse. Perhaps you are not seeing them if nobody on your tech-focused instance has subscribed to any of those communities.

It doesn't work now ofc, b/c it does not exist! But it could work however we make it to work! It is only subject to the constraints of like logical possibilities plus technical implementation effectiveness. e.g., just like the language options, or applying a NSFW or spoiler tag (currently the former only applies to posts while the latter only applies to comments), when someone makes a community they could make their own selections as to which categories they want to be listed under. It could be hierarchical - e.g. "hockey" could presume "sports" but not the reverse - or not, in which case the latter would be interpreted more as a "sports, general" or "sports, other" category, rather than a super-category that includes other sub- ones.

And, just like the language options and NSFW/spoilers, people will forget to mark their communities/posts/comments, so that model could never be a perfect solution. Then again, nothing else will ever be perfect either so... it is no reason not to try? Especially if enough people and enough communities DO want it.

Anyway I am not a Lemmy developer, just saying that I hope that such a thing may come here, eventually, to make it more welcoming to newcomers, so that they don't have to spend hours and hours subscribing to this and that and also blocking others. :-)

But right now, the connection issues and defense against hostile attackers spamming the Fediverse with CP are much more major considerations, so I do not believe it will come anytime "soon".

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.