both of which are terrible options

Which is why I am talking about a new option, which does not yet exist but I am saying that I wish that it did.

Likewise, two previous options that went from not-existing to now-existing-and-are-extremely-helpful are the ability to block an entire instance rather than each community and each user on that instance separately, and the ability to set your language preferences and have most (or at least some?) even if not all communities dedicated entirely to a different language not show up.

Likewise, if you could specifically target - either in the positive sense of subscribing to or in the negative sense of blocking - communities that match certain pre-defined keywords that communities could choose to use to identify themselves, like "hockey" or more generally "sports", or to use another example "vegetarian cooking" or more generally "cooking", then later if tens or even hundreds of additional communities were to be spun up within that same category, you could remain subscribed to or block them ALL, if you so chose, without having to make that determination for each and every single one, individually, and then repeat that process every time a new one appears. This could be modified by making a stronger choice of an individual community override the weaker choice of a mere category - e.g. if I like hockey but hate a particular team (fuck those guys in particular) or whatever.

Since these types of communities (as "sports" or "cooking" or "which app used to connect to Lemmy" etc.) rarely correlate with instance, this has nothing to do with a Local feed. Rather it is like the other two aforementioned examples in that, depending on implementation, possibly being able to affect your Subscription (adding subs to categories of communities) and All (minus categories of things you would prefer to not see) feeds. The latter is where it is most helpful b/c if you were looking for new things to subscribe to, but you will NEVER in your life ever subscribe to e.g. sports or cooking, then it saves you a great deal of time & effort from having to make those determinations on a per-post or per-community basis. Especially when they can be quite popular to other people, and thus ranked highly when sorted by Top or also Hot b/c of the interactivity with them, but when your preferences diverge from the mainstream. It helps make the whole place much more "welcoming" then, when automation more or less mindlessly takes care of such things that otherwise would require individual curation effort to achieve.

"Default behavior" can be an entirely separate matter, or it could be related but I am saying that it does not have to be. The way I am thinking of it, this would all be optional, just like blocking or subscribing to a community is now. Eventually some app could even offer a wizard to guide users through selecting those keywords that they might want, but that is getting too far ahead of ourselves here.

It doesn't work now ofc, b/c it does not exist! But it could work however we make it to work! It is only subject to the constraints of like logical possibilities plus technical implementation effectiveness. e.g., just like the language options, or applying a NSFW or spoiler tag (currently the former only applies to posts while the latter only applies to comments), when someone makes a community they could make their own selections as to which categories they want to be listed under. It could be hierarchical - e.g. "hockey" could presume "sports" but not the reverse - or not, in which case the latter would be interpreted more as a "sports, general" or "sports, other" category, rather than a super-category that includes other sub- ones.

And, just like the language options and NSFW/spoilers, people will forget to mark their communities/posts/comments, so that model could never be a perfect solution. Then again, nothing else will ever be perfect either so... it is no reason not to try? Especially if enough people and enough communities DO want it.

Anyway I am not a Lemmy developer, just saying that I hope that such a thing may come here, eventually, to make it more welcoming to newcomers, so that they don't have to spend hours and hours subscribing to this and that and also blocking others. :-)

But right now, the connection issues and defense against hostile attackers spamming the Fediverse with CP are much more major considerations, so I do not believe it will come anytime "soon".

But then you only get, like, 5 posts a day.

An important - crucial - clarification is that it is not community censorship aka prohibition of a topic deemed offensive in some manner, it is rather self-censorship aka controlling one's own method of personal discourse. The latter is such an enormously different thing that most people don't even lump it together in their minds with the implications that come up when you say the word "censorship", which implies solely the former.

I do the same thing with my personal cellphone number and email address btw - I control who I answer, though I do not "censor" who is allowed to send a message to me. As do we all. The same goes with TV programs, and almost literally every website that either of us has ever been to (unless we go to... those places, though notably they lie off the beaten path for a reason...).

If you want to use solely your Subscribed feed, then I am not stopping you - why would I want to censor you or remove any capabilities from you in any way? Or anyone else for that matter?

I am talking about making All more usable, rather than virtually useless, especially as the Fediverse expands further, and community tastes become more diverse. Right now, you can log out or use an alternate account to view a version of the All feed that includes communities that you have blocked, so obtaining that level of functionality is super easy (as some might say, barely an inconvenience:-P), but the converse is not true: it takes HOURS of effort to try to curate the All feed to something that more closely resembles your interests, without being as rigidly locked-down as your Subscribed feed.

To give a personal example: I blocked the Docker communities, knowing that I can always choose to visit them at any time later whenever I want (again, while logged out, with a different account, or by removing the block), though I have subscribed to generic Linux communities, and yet I have done neither for self-hosting ones. This gives me a tripartite level of control in-between "All" vs. "None", where I can choose, if I want, to see those posts at some lower frequency than "always/100%" yet still see them.

Which reminds me, I have described in some other reply how my thoughts on an implementation strategy could involve both adding new communities to your Subscribed feed, without you having to manually add each new one that comes along, and also remove new communities from your Blocked list, in like manner; yet an alternate implementation could rather be a new sorting method or new feed, that takes your weighted suggestions into account e.g. shows highly-ranked sports posts at only 1% frequency, here too providing a new option somewhere in-between 100% and 0%.

That sounds nice to me:-). Options are good. This is Lemmy - we can git gud, if we want! And others can choose to ignore these new options, if they want.

I have a start to that, in the form of my block list:-). Of course it is highly tuned to my personal interests, and does not do full "categorization" beyond merely "is in said list" vs. "is not in said list", plus it only helps me personally rather than e.g. someone fleeing Reddit due to their continual messes. In that way it is like recommending a book to someone, vs. making the entire Dewey Decimal or other system to classify books in a manner that makes retrieval easier for other people.

Moreover, I think the main part would be to allow community self-selection - e.g. if I call something by a term, that is me putting that label onto them, while if they choose it for themselves it seems much more friendly?

Anyway, I thought lists of communities were already widely available? The trick might rather be to keep them maintained - e.g. to open up a wiki page, except that starts to involve who will host it, and like everything else Fediverse-related, who will fight off the hostile actors who keep uploading CP to it? (see e.g. this post describing yet another instance closing b/c of such attacks)

These matters are not so "simple" - e.g. would a far-right community be "heroes" or "genocidal terrorists", or both depending on who you ask? In my own personal block list, I get to make my own determinations (bonus: at a low-resolution level of merely "see" vs. "not see" such content, without having to think any more about it!:-P), but attempting to go beyond that... really does require some consensus-building skills. OR we could hope for UI tools that allow people to choose their own personal preferred method of accessing content across the Fediverse, which side-steps all that and keeps it at the level of unique, personal preferences.

The detraction is that if too rigidly applied, it creates echo chambers. On the other hand, please feel free to look at all the CP, pics of food, and descriptions of sportsting that you like, yet *I* do not want to waste my time with such, and if the only choices are "All" or "None", then I want the option to choose the latter, at least sometimes. I would presume that others think likewise.

Algorithms, great idea, horrible in practice.

Tbf, it is not the computer's fault - someone made it do that, and that same someone is the type to call a landline phone just as you sit down to family dinner (Leave It To Beaver style - at least I assume they did that in that show:-), or to literally knock on your literal door and try to sell you a vacuum cleaner or whatever - i.e. it is pure human greed, and the algorithm is just their latest tool in the toolbox to accomplish that.

Anyway, algorithms can be used for good too, if we wanted them to. Asimov for instance prompted three laws of robotics including foremost among them that robots would be allowed to do no harm - which is itself and interesting proposition bc like how else would a doctor perform surgery if it couldn't cut into a patient, or like what if a robot absolutely refuses to allow humans to commit suicide, or even to die in any way despite having lived for thousands (millions?) of years already? (It would become pure torture at some point!) To do a good or evil act, something needs to have "agency", but right now algorithms are purely tools to reach some externally defined end.