I think there’s a need for a social media platform that allows users to create multiple customizable feeds tailored to their specific, fluid interests over time.
On sites like Twitter or Mastodon, you mainly just have one feed based on the people or tags you follow. The problem is, to get a whole new customized feed, you’d need to make an entirely new account on these platforms.
On sites like Reddit or Lemmy, there are a few feeds predefined for each community, new, hot, top, etc. This doesn’t offer anything in terms of individual user customization.
I envision a platform where each user can make as many different personalized feeds as they want based around interests that might change over time and the feed would change accordingly without having to start from zero. This could work only for people who opt-in since there are people who dislike this kind of algorithms.
I’m curious to hear any ideas or suggestions people have about how to implement customizable, evolving feeds for each person. And how many resources would it require, would it work on a federated network made of personal computers or would it require a large server?
Reddit offers something like that with Multis.
On sites like Twitter or Mastodon, you mainly just have one feed based on the people or tags you follow
X has had lists, which allow multiple feeds for the same account, for a very long time now.
This doesn’t offer anything in terms of individual user personalization.
Reddit has the multireddit feature.
All of the above have to be set up manually, but Threads changes your feed in real time within the same session based on your interactions.
On Mastodon I do have two accounts for my two main interests. But each account has some kind of “event” it joins in with once a week, that’s different to the usual content. For those days I just use lists to create custom feeds and switch between them as necessary, no reason you couldn’t expand that system to follow your ever-changing whims. (Edit: and now that you can exclude the members of a list from your home feed it’s got even better)
Tbh on Reddit I’d never even heard of multireddits despite using the site for like a decade. Not sure how that one slipped by me. But turns out it is a useful feature, so until we get it built in to Lemmy core I keep the Summit app installed on my phone and have some custom multicommunities set up on there for the weekly event stuff too.
Not the slickest solutions in the world (especially the Lemmy once since it makes it phone-only). But technically this is already something you have a decent amount of control over if you put the time into setting it up.
Kbin just released Collections, its feature to allow users to create groups of magazines. The microblogging side of the fediverse has lists. It sounds like this is basically what you’re asking for.
It looks like you’re on kbin, which doesn’t have lists. The equivalent feature is Collections but its fairly new. Collections are essentially arbitrary groupings of magazines, similar to reddits multireddits.
Lists on microblogging platforms allow you to manage multiple groupings of accounts instead of following them all. So your home timeline could be people you know IRL and you could have a list for different interests and you can view each one independently.
To further add onto this, they can be public or private. Public Collections are able to be followed by other users. This would be helpful for increasing discoverability for fellow users and communities/magazines. You can create Private Collections for personalized feeds that you may not want to share, negating the need to create a new account for feeds with a different theme or purpose.
Multireddits were a GODSEND
A lot of people are talking about multi’s, but I think the new ground here is this idea of a fluid shifting with a change in the user’s interests. The first method that comes to mind is something like a “personal” sort, where posts are further weighted based on the number of recent interactions with a given community.
RSS feeds are great for this! I’ve been using them for years. It allows you to build your own universal feed of everything on the internet. Open RSS is a organization that provides RSS feeds for any website. Here’s a good article that talks about what RSS feeds are.
I use RSS feeds to follow Lemmy, Mastodon, and Kbin communities and even specific users. For example, the RSS feed for the community this was posted in is at
https://openrss.org/lemmy.world/c/fediverse
You just add that to your RSS reader app along with any other web feeds and you have a feed tailored to everything you want to follow, catered to your interests. And no algorithms because everything is always in chronological order.
