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I built the first 100% private, on-device "For You" feed on the fediverse (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi all,

Quiblr now has personalized post feeds for Lemmy!

I haven't seen a "recommended feed" feature anywhere else in the fediverse but I thought I would take a crack at building it!

My goal was to make a privacy-focused recommendation engine that tailors your experience based on the content you interact with. None of the data leaves your device. You don't even need to log in for it to work

You can turn it off or tune your feed in the settings
Each post now also includes a show me more/less button

I would LOVE feedback from folks if you get a chance to try it out!

This was really fun to build so let me know if there are any questions!

PS: Let me know if someone else has built this feature for the fediverse - then I will change the title to not claim "the first" lol

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 months ago (2 children)

This is great! Some feedback on UI:

The first thing I did was click ⇩ on a post and it prompted me to log-in. This is confusing because I thought I could train the recommender without having to log-in. It took me a minute to find the "Like/Dislike" buttons because they require an extra click to open the post menu. Maybe make the Like/Dislike a bit more prominent and accessible, and find a way to differentiate between the controls for training the recommender and the upvote/downvote actions on the post itself. Or even better, make them the same thing so there's only one pair of controls and if you're not logged-in then upvoting just boosts the recommendation but doesn't actually send the upvote action to the post.
Please use actual links (<a href=""></a>) for post navigation so that I can tell my browser to open a link in a new tab. Usually I middle-click to do this (in Firefox) but since the post title and content only respond to javascript events, I can't middle click to open in a new tab. Clicking the post opens it in the same window.
Add text content of posts, or at least a button to expand the text content. Right now text posts are just the post title and I have to click through to read the content.
Add alt-text (tooltips) to your buttons. I know what the standard share/bookmark icons look like but it helps to have tooltips to be sure.
Add a link to open the original post (on the origin server). Every fediverse UI has this. If you have it too, I couldn't find it.
Allow me to see (and drag) the scrollbar of the main content frame.
Add a refresh button (maybe at the top of the feed) so that I can generate more recommended content without having to actually reload the page in the browser.
When clicking a community name, I get the community page but I can't press the back button to go back to the feed.
If I "dislike" a post, I don't expect to see it again after a refresh, or ever.

Also, it's a bit late to change it now, but the name is very 2009-internet-startup.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Lots of great feedback. I'll try to address each:

I tried to differentiate voting vs. "like/dislike" for the algorithm as to not confuse users who think they are logged in. I can put more thought into how to make this a bit more intuitive
Quiblr is built as a progress web app (PWA) so it uses native app components. The benefit is that it is faster and easier to manage multiple code bases. But the con is that it doesn't have all the same benefits as HTML. I added an "open posts in new tab" feature in the settings
I like the idea of added more body text in the post itself. My fear was that it would make the feed look too crowded, but I can take second look at it
I love the tooltips idea
The 3 dot ellipses has a Post Detail section for each post. Maybe this could be a good place to add the link back to the original Instance url.
I like the scrollbar idea. I think this could make sense as an optional setting because I personally don't prefer the scroll bar but I want to include it for users who do prefer it
I added a refresh button for users using the PWA version (since they don't have a refresh button in the browser). Maybe something like "pull down to refresh" could work on
You should be able to press the "<" back button when viewing a community on mobile or just back in your browser. Both should take you back to your feed. Let me know if it isn't working as intended
I'll have to see the API allows for removing downvoted items from feeds. I can try to get creative if needed

Edit: Added tooltips for post buttons + original url on the Post Detail page. I will continue to update this comment as I work through other additions in this list

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

I'll second all of these, especially the lack of scrollbar and "expand text post in feed" button, and the hidden like/dislike buttons. The like/dislike vs upvote/downvote thing is tricky; I don't have a good solution for it, but maybe different icons that don't read as up/down would work.

Also, from a quick poke at things:

There doesn't seem to be a way to switch the "For You" feed away from card view. I think it's fine if you want to make it a separate view setting from the main page, but I'd like to be able to change it to my view of choice.
I'd like to see the post/comment body text tweaked for better readability: higher contrast against the background, a touch more space between lines, and a lighter weight (regular or medium) would all make reading long posts more pleasant, imo.
In compact view, if I expand the attached image, there doesn't seem to be a way to shrink it back down, as clicking again opens the post.
When viewing a post, there's a community sidebar on the right with all the rules and such, but that info is missing from the actual community detail page.
The community sidebar on the post page scrolls separately from the rest of the post, which is weird to me on desktop. Giving it an "expand" button might be a good compromise, so you don't have the weird case of short post/long sidebar unless the user explicitly asks for it.
Navigating front page > post page > community detail page, and then hitting back on the browser twice returns me to what the nav bar tells me is the front page, but only that one community's posts are shown. Refreshing or clicking "front page" fixes this, but it's a little confusing the first time.
Navigating front page > community detail page doesn't trigger a... page load, I guess? My browser (firefox) doesn't recognize the community detail page as a separate page, so I can't hit back to go back to the main feed. Instead, I have to either refresh or click "front page".

Overall, though, this is super impressive!