I wish there was some feature in the works to let me see less memes and US politics without having to block or subscribe to a bunch of communities.
I think that I’d probably just aim to find interesting communities and subscribe.
Right now, community discoverability is really bad in Lemmy. But Lemmy Explorer lets you browse a list of communities across all instances, which is probably more like what most people are wanting:
Hit Lemmy Explorer, look for communities that are interesting, subscribe to those.
I guess it’d also be possible for someone – not even the lemmy project necessarily, third-party – to try to do a Web front-end, recommend posts across all communities based on what you want – but that’s kinda a non-community-centric model, and I think that Reddit and lemmy/kbin are kinda fundamentally community-centric. With their model, it actually has some…problems to just send people to random communities. Kbin had (probably still has) a feature to randomly throw some posts in the sidebar to help people discover new communities. That quickly ran into some issues:
Some people really don’t want certain types of random content showing up in their sidebar, like NSFW content (especially if people have forgotten to flag it as NSFW).
Some people don’t pay attention to the community they’re in. Kbin’s random recommendations results in kbin sending a bunch of random users into random (sometimes quite niche) communities and sometimes those people don’t pay much attention to the instance or community. I remember seeing some random kbin user go to something like technology@pawb.social – a furry instance – and comment disparagingly on how there were multiple furries in the discussion. A bunch of responses later along the “why are you even in this community if you have an issue with furries”, people figured out that it was someone being randomly thrown into the thing. I think that randomly injecting people into communities can kind of cause frictions.
Any recommendation system is inevitably – especially if the Threadiverse grows a lot – going to have people game it to try to ram things they want to promote in front of people’s eyeballs. And if the recommendation algorithm is open-source, even easier. With a community-centric approach, the mods can handle that, but if you’re looking at posts from random communities, not so much.
I think that I’d probably just aim to find interesting communities and subscribe.
Right now, community discoverability is really bad in Lemmy. But Lemmy Explorer lets you browse a list of communities across all instances, which is probably more like what most people are wanting:
https://lemmyverse.net/communities
Hit Lemmy Explorer, look for communities that are interesting, subscribe to those.
I guess it’d also be possible for someone – not even the lemmy project necessarily, third-party – to try to do a Web front-end, recommend posts across all communities based on what you want – but that’s kinda a non-community-centric model, and I think that Reddit and lemmy/kbin are kinda fundamentally community-centric. With their model, it actually has some…problems to just send people to random communities. Kbin had (probably still has) a feature to randomly throw some posts in the sidebar to help people discover new communities. That quickly ran into some issues:
Some people really don’t want certain types of random content showing up in their sidebar, like NSFW content (especially if people have forgotten to flag it as NSFW).
Some people don’t pay attention to the community they’re in. Kbin’s random recommendations results in kbin sending a bunch of random users into random (sometimes quite niche) communities and sometimes those people don’t pay much attention to the instance or community. I remember seeing some random kbin user go to something like technology@pawb.social – a furry instance – and comment disparagingly on how there were multiple furries in the discussion. A bunch of responses later along the “why are you even in this community if you have an issue with furries”, people figured out that it was someone being randomly thrown into the thing. I think that randomly injecting people into communities can kind of cause frictions.
Any recommendation system is inevitably – especially if the Threadiverse grows a lot – going to have people game it to try to ram things they want to promote in front of people’s eyeballs. And if the recommendation algorithm is open-source, even easier. With a community-centric approach, the mods can handle that, but if you’re looking at posts from random communities, not so much.