🇨🇦 tunetardis

I’m not a web dev but was chatting with a friend who is, lamenting web 2.0 for pretty much the same reasons as OP. He’s like “2.0?!? Where have you been? It’s all about web3 and blockchains.” Now where was that comfortable old rock I had been hiding under again?

When the www was in its infancy, I thought there needed to be a standardized way to classify content. Something Dewey Decimal System-ish I suppose? But it would need to be easy for casual content providers to use, since the only way it could work would be in at a grass roots, decentralized level where each provider would be responsible for classifying their own content.

Perhaps there could be tools like expert systems that would ask you a number of questions about your data and then link it up appropriately. It could usher in a golden age of library science!

But then everyone went fuck that. Search engines.

Ah ok, thanks!

What caused the jump in the first place? I only just opened an account myself because the folks who run my home instance lemmy.ca started up pixelfed.ca about a week ago and I decided to check it out.

I suppose the same could be said on the lemmy side. There’s no reason someone couldn’t write a lemmy app that lets you do what an RSS client does in terms of only showing content from a selected subgroup of communities.

You raise a good point that it would be nice to have more control over which group of communities you are drawing from at a given time. (Is there a way to group subscriptions and switch between them?) It’s a bit disconcerting to see 5 tech headlines and then suddenly something about the war in Ukraine or whatever. It jars my train of thought. With an RSS client, you can group feeds however you want.

That said, my experience with RSS readers is not quite so idyllic. In the end, rather than having nicely partitioned feed groups by topic, I wind up having to separate the ones that produce content frequently but with a poor signal-to-noise from those that post once in awhile but are generally worth your time. With something like lemmy, people are helping you do the work of finding the more interesting content from that site that posts every 10 minutes.

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Anyways, did I miss anything?

I think the big problem in link aggregation is how to sort/prioritize content for the end user. RSS does not provide a way to do this, nor should it as far as I’m concerned. It should simply be about public content being tagged in a standardized way for any app to come along and organize it using whatever algorithm.

A simple RSS reader has the problem that the more prolific sites will tend to flood your feed and make it tedious to scroll through miles of links. Commercial news portals try to learn your tastes through some sort of machine learning algorithm and direct content accordingly. This sounds like a good idea in theory, but tends to build echo chambers around people that reinforce their biases, and that hasn’t done a lot of good for the world to put it mildly.

The lemmy approach is to use one of a number of sorting algorithms built atop a crowd-sourced voting model. It may not be perfect, but I prefer it to being psychoanalyzed by an AI.

Btw there was a post from about a month ago where someone was offering to make any RSS feed into a community. I’ve subscribed to a few of them and it’s actually pretty awesome.

Didn’t kbin have a separate mechanism for supporting a post in a more public way? I can’t remember how that worked now, but it was in addition to the regular voting I think?