this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Jerboa

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Jerboa is a native-android client for Lemmy, built using the native android framework, Jetpack Compose.

Warning: You can submit issues, but between Lemmy and lemmy-ui, I probably won't have too much time to work on them. Learn jetpack compose like I did if you want to help make this app better.

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Jerboa is made by Lemmy's developers, and is free, open-source software, meaning no advertising, monetizing, or venture capital, ever. Your donations directly support full-time development of the project.

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Dismissing already seen content ? A proposal (put user back in control of algorithmic content discovery and more) (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hi,

If you're like me, your probably seeing a lot of stuff you've already seen in jerboa

On Reddit this didn't happen because the site takes into account how many times a post was printed and the more you've seen it, the quicker it would disappear from your version of the front page.

Now of course jerboa could and should do this, But I think there's two opportunities to make this better than Reddit. On one part, putting the squarely in control of the content discovery algorithm, next, solicit user input and ask him to lend a hand in the social sorting algorithm that is voting.

So, a user voting sounds be a way to tell jerboa that "I've seen this" and it shouldn't show it anymore on my feed. To prevent bias, the neutral vote should be added.

Next is giving the user more explicit control of the algorithm. When you vote up or down, you're sorting for the community but also for yourself. Jerboa should take into account user's voting pattern and recommend current based on what the user likes.

These voting patterns should be publicly exchanged in "out of band" communication. Jerboa could then use these voting patterns to further help with content discovery in the following way.

"My user likes X,Y,Z, after consulting public voting patterns, we can see that most users who like X,Y,Z often also like A,B,C and dislike I,J,K"

This is how Netflix, YouTube and other algorithms find stuff you like.

The difference is now, this runs on your computer. You can see your algorithm weights and edit them. Place extra filters on them and most important, swap , export, import algorithm sorting weights and exchange them with others users, craft them for specific usage and etc.

Plus of course, basic function like chronological view that doesn't cheat or insert ads.

Algorithmic content discovery under user control is going to be the biggest user benefit of switching to Lemmy versus a private commercial centralized platform. Our data will finally serve us !

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

A sorting algorithm seems out of scope for Jerboa, which is just a lightweight client. The current algorithms, such as they are, are handled by Lemmy itself, and I think it makes more sense to keep it that way so that features aren't unique to this one app. Plus that way you aren't downloading the entire list of content and sorting it locally, which seems somewhat expensive versus just sorting it on the server where it already is.

[โ€“] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

Well, the user's preference for sorting algorithm have to be communicated somehow from the jerboa client to the Lemmy server.

But from a user interface point of view, if the sorting is happening in the server or the client doesn't make they much difference.

However, from a user to control point of view, I think it should be always possible for the client to do its own sorting.

There is no danger of losing chronological ordering , if the chronological sort is happening inside the user's device.

Also there are privacy implications, I might want to train my algorithm to sort content recommendation based on what I like. That doesn't mean I want to disclose this information to the server. In particular if I'm not on an instance that I trust not to exploit this information to leverage advertising against me.

Also, content discovery does not work well if users don't share their preferences to each other. But the server doesn't need to know this information. User might exchange this information ins peer to peer manner and keep the server out of the loop.

This would disempower the instance owners from the ability to tip the scales of content curation, since they don't know what posts users like and client request unbiased sequential listing of content which the client itself will sort later.