Ok, so one of the bigger problems I see on Lemmy is the fact that I subscribe to dozens of different communities, but my feed is always the same. News news news technology technology technology.

What if I want something lighthearted? What if I DON’T want to see certain topics???

Maybe I’m at work, and a big sports game is going on. I don’t want spoilers, so now I can’t look at Lemmy.

Or what if Nintendo hosts a Nintendo Direct before I get a chance to see it? Welp. Can’t look at Lemmy.

But…what if I could? What if my main feed was exactly what it is now. But what if I had user created catagories? I could make one called “News”. Now if I want to see the news, I can include that catagory in my home feed. Or I can exclude it from my home feed. I could switch over to the news catagory, and then every community that I’ve designated under the news catagory that I’ve created will show ONLY those communities home feed.

Or maybe I want to see only video game related stuff.

Or maybe I only want to see sports stuff.

I could even create user created tabs. I could name the first one “Happy” and it could include light hearted catagories. Things like /c/aww and /c/humor

I could have a tab called “Serious” and it could be all news, and updates on the world.

I could have a tab called “Nerdy” and it could be all technology and video game related stuff.

Or I could have my main home tab, where I choose which communities/catagories do and don’t appear.

And you could do the same concept in Mastadon with followed users. If you follow some users who only post about pro-wrestling, and you don’t want to see that? Uncheck your pro-wrestling catagory from your home feed tab. Have a seperate tab just for pro-wrestling.

I’m sure you could implement this with other fediverse services. I just haven’t used many to give examples of how they would work, if I don’t know how the core platforms themselves work.

  • Rimu
    2•5 months ago

    Yeah I’m pretty interested in this and Topics is only the first iteration of the idea. At the time piefed.social was basically a single-user instance so making the topics admin-manually-curated groupings was fine. Perhaps it’s time to take things to the next level, tho.

    The concept of ‘multireddits’ sounds like a bundle of related functionality and I’m not sure which parts of that you’re interested in that PieFed’s “topics” doesn’t already do. Is it the user-created part? The subscribing part? The join-many-communties-at-once part? PieFed does some of those already but you won’t see it unless you’re logged in…

    • @[email protected]English
      1•5 months ago

      Is it the user-created part? The subscribing part?

      Yeah basically those parts, i guess , for example if i want a multireddit i want “news” without the politics and certain communities (e.g. business and “the police problem” i don’t want), i guess that’s a typical use case for average Joe, he wants news but not too much news. i think there is research showing too much news is bad for mental health and social media might cause radicalization (see a scientific systematic review of the subject)

      • Rimu
        2•5 months ago

        Yeah user-created topics would be a fine enhancement. Various aspects of the multireddit concept have separate issues in the issue queue but they haven’t been coherently tied together yet. It might be time to do that.

        One way to limit exposure to negative news is a keyword filter, which I implemented 6 months ago, early on in the project: https://piefed.social/post/7576

        • @[email protected]English
          1•5 months ago

          One way to limit exposure to negative news is a keyword filter, which I implemented 6 months ago, early on in the project: https://piefed.social/post/7576

          avoidance is generally considered harmful for mental health, what would be better is giving users the ability to curate their information diet, news sources should be trustworthy , display rational reasoning which might help users learn by observation (aka observational learning) , this will be helpful for mental health and mental fitness because rational thinking is associated with mental health.

          multireddits could help with that because instead of getting just news about ukraine/israel/sudan/iran from a general community, you could get it from communities specific to those conflicts , the people subscribing to these communities are probably more motivated to discuss it so they will generate more rational thinking (which is more effortful so it requires more motivation).