The Hackernews thread on this discusses how this has been known for years and hasn’t been fixed by Google

Thanks a bunch! It took me a while to craft the solution to make sure it was both effective + private. I was originally inspired by Canopy. They built a news aggregator with private & personalized posts a few years back and the idea sat in my head.

To answer your question(s), there are quite a few signals that big tech uses to recommend content. Not all of them are privacy invasive (or at least they don't HAVE to be). My approach was to do thorough research on the different signals used by big tech to make their recommendation engines, and just build ones that 1.) were possible given fediverse API limitations and 2.) private. I had to craft some novel approaches to make it work but I'm pretty happy with the outcome!

One of the biggest differences between the "big tech" approach and Quiblr's is that most big tech does not keep data simply on your device. They store it in datacenters to build large social-webs to essentially cluster users (and push more relevant ads).

But I was able utilize many of the other signals used by big tech (e.g. communities you engage with, metadata of content you read, dwell time, post/comment/vote activity) and I designed it to work offline with no servers.

Edit: grammar

I’m surprised it has taken them so long to switch to Wordpress given that they are owned by the same company

Everyone. NO EXCEPTION

I wonder who is funding such efforts 🤔

This dude is straight up frying avocado and rice

I’ll upvote this, but I refuse to comment

This is a fascinating read and very relevant given that Meta is moving closer to connecting Threads (per OP). The article gives a good example with How Google killed XMPP

You make great points. I think this should be one of the top goals for frontend Lemmy devs. Most users are not super technical. The fediverse (lemmy included) should work with minimal friction to be accessible.

If you're open to it, I'd love to get your feedback on my Lemmy frontend's onboarding and overall user experience. I've been trying to make it simple, effective, and accessible. I can DM you!

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

The recommendation engine is 100% private and on-device + it can be turned off via settings. It's novel and more experimental, but I wanted it to be available for folks to get more relevant content

For the remove duplicate posts feature, it keeps whichever is 1st in the feed (so it depends which sort method is used). It only applies for posts with the same title and from the same OP. Another experimental feature, but this has been a particular point of annoyance that I've heard from folks (i.e. the same exact post filling up a feed)

I built the Quiblr web app. I love the idea of being able to filter results for a given instance! I will see if I can push an update tonight

Edit: I pushed an update to implement Advanced Search options on the Communities Page. Given how the API works, community IDs are different between each Instance so you can't view the post feed on another Instance's community -but- I made a solution that lets you VIEW the communities on different instances (regardless of your home instance). If you are not signed in, you can change the instance with a single button push.

Hope your friend finds this feature helpful!

I’m not going to lie. I can’t keep up with all this. He’s CEO, he’s fired, he’s rehired, he’s not actually rehired, he now works at Microsoft. Talk about a crazy weekend

My goal in life is to reach this state of zen

WE AWE THE BRI ISH!

But in all seriousness, I've heard bri ish and briddish. I guess it comes down to dialect

That's a really good point. It's unfortunate that polyester tends to be the go-to cheap option for clothes

I would imagine that if bots accounted for so much traffic, we would see more steep vertical growth in numbers

I

Notes! I’ll aim to add it to the next release. Thanks

Nobody could have predicted this. NOBODY! /s