For any social network, not just a federated one.
My thoughts: The way it works in big tech social networks is like this:
- **The organic methods: **
- your followee shares something from a poster you don’t follow
- someone you don’t follow comments on a post from someone you follow
- you join a group or community and find others you currently don’t follow
- The recommendation engine methods: content you do not follow shows up, and you are likely to engage in it based on statistical models. Big tech is pushing this more and more.
- Search: you specifically attempt to find what you’re looking for through some search capability. Big tech is pushing against this more and more.
In my opinion, the fediverse covers #1 well already. But #1 has a bubble effect. Your followees are less likely to share something very drastically different from what you already have.
The fediverse is principally opposed to #2, at least the way it is done in big tech. But maybe some variation of it could be done well.
#3 is a big weakness for fediverse. But I am curious how it would ideally manifest. Would it be full text search? Semantic search? Or something with more machine learning?
When you say “feed” you mean your general news feed?
What if I only liked memes from [email protected], and other meme communities were too normie or boring for me? You’re going back to the issue with big tech social media, where they push on you what you didn’t sign up for, and you don’t necessarily like it!
I’m not against a recommendation engine, but it needs to be a lot more intentional from the user, and more transparent. I really dislike the “were just gonna push content you didn’t ask for here, but we think you’ll like it!”. No user choice, no transparency.
Btw, you should look into Quiblr. It’s a lemmy client that does sort of what you want. It has a built in recommendation engine, and it watches your engagement metrics to determine what you’ll like more of. The only thing it may not have is recommending you communities that aren’t visible to your instance (because no one on your instance follows it).
When I say “feed”, I mean the general homepage I see when I log into my account, rather than my Subscribed, Following, etc. views. I understand your concern, but if other related communities don’t suit you, then you’re free to block them as they come up. I think a ratio of 4 “in-bubble” to 1 “related” post would be fair. Maybe there could even be a slider somewhere depending on your software.
One of the few reasons I’ve never minded that part of the presentation on larger social media sites is that they operate on an opt-out model compared to the fediverse’s (current) opt-in model. But I think there’s enough transparency in “you like [email protected], here’s content from other groups we know with names containing ‘memes’”.
I may have to try out Quiblr, but I strongly prefer kbin/mbin to Lemmy, because I enjoy interacting with both the microblog side and the thread side of the fediverse on a single account. If mbin ever gets a video tab (for Loops & PeerTube), I’m going to jump for joy.
I made Quiblr. There is a quick demo of the For You feed on Quiblr’s Github. Let me know if you have any questions.