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
That does actually look interesting and might revolutionize parts of the Fediverse, ngl. Is it open-source?
I dunno if this is within your wheelhouse but what I’d really like to see is a manual weighting by community.
So, for example, if you’re mildly interested in Linux, you can give those communities a 3/10 weight and that way you’d only see the most popular content rather than having it dominate your entire feed.
And then a gaming community 10/10 weight so you’d see every single post.
Maybe you can combine the 2 and just make the automatic “for you” weighting visible and manually adjustable.
Without it being open source and not providing reproducible builds, the privacy claims are borderline weightless.
Agree, but anyone competent could just sniff the traffic. (Or hopefully, lack thereof)
For sure. What the aforementioned bits of information provide is the ability to be confident in the privacy of software if one were to treat it as a black box, ie an average consumer.
This. For all we know, the app could be doing all kinds of nefarious things and we wouldn’t be able to tell.
Hm, I feel that it’s inaccurate to say “we wouldn’t be able to tell”. It’s not exactly a black box system — the app would have to run on an operating system, and if you are able to know what the operating system is doing, and what instructions are being executed by the CPU, then you can know exactly what the app is doing.
What the aforementioned bits of information provide is the ability to treat software as a black box and be sure of its safety without having to fundamentally audit it.
Wow. This is pretty impressive since you usually only see these kinds of things from big tech companies and their stuff is definitely NOT privacy friendly.
Can you provide more detail on how it works and how it is different than what big tech is doing?
It does not. I haven’t used matrix yet. What are matrix rooms used for?
Are like Discord federated.
Matrix can be used also in place of Telegram/Whatsapp.
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.
It would be best not to direct users to sign up at lemmy.world by default. There’s nothing wrong with lemmy.world, it’s just that I feel it’d be better if users spread out more rather than only amassing in the larger instances.
I would LOVE feedback from folks if you get a chance to try it out!
I have feedback completely unrelated to the recommendation engine: please consider using CSS prefers-color-scheme instead of defaulting to light mode.
Notes! I’ll aim to add it to the next release. Thanks
Little feedback on the UI from taking a peek at this.
When I went into settings and adjusted post display style from card to anything else, it wasn’t clear to me that this wouldn’t apply to the new For You feed, which left me confused and less inclined to use it. I still gave it a try to make sure I wasn’t missing anything and to see how much the feed seemed to change with some light interaction, but I think you’d need to use it more than I did to see an effect.
Problem being: display settings not applying to the For You feed means I’m not going to use it much with the default card view.
Second part is that there was some comment display lag as I looked through posts, so if I looked at a post about cats with cat-related comments, those comments would linger and appear for a moment under a different post about possums. It’s just long enough to be noticeable, so thought it worth mentioning.
Valid. I finished the functionality of the For You feed and wanted to share before wrapping up all the formatting styles for the posts. Should be fixed here in a few hours.
Also, I’ll see if there is a better way to dynamically load comments. Thanks for the feedback!
Edit: Other post formats are now available on the For You feed
This is great! Is it open source? The only thing I found missing was an about page.
Not open source (at least yet). Quiblr has been a side project for me and I’ve never managed an open source project before lol I’m talking with a buddy on how that could work though because he manages a few open source projects
Also, I added an about page in Settings >> For You >> Learn More
There’s not that much that you have to do. Just take the code, put a FOSS license (e.g. AGPLv3 or BSD 3-clause) on it and publish it.
Yeah, when someone says private I assume I can self host.
