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
Wow. This is pretty impressive since you usually only see these kinds of things from big tech companies and their stuff is definitely NOT privacy friendly.
Can you provide more detail on how it works and how it is different than what big tech is doing?
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 would LOVE feedback from folks if you get a chance to try it out!
I have feedback completely unrelated to the recommendation engine: please consider using CSS prefers-color-scheme instead of defaulting to light mode.
Notes! I’ll aim to add it to the next release. Thanks
I dunno if this is within your wheelhouse but what I’d really like to see is a manual weighting by community.
So, for example, if you’re mildly interested in Linux, you can give those communities a 3/10 weight and that way you’d only see the most popular content rather than having it dominate your entire feed.
And then a gaming community 10/10 weight so you’d see every single post.
Maybe you can combine the 2 and just make the automatic “for you” weighting visible and manually adjustable.
This is great! Is it open source? The only thing I found missing was an about page.
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
It would be best not to direct users to sign up at lemmy.world by default. There’s nothing wrong with lemmy.world, it’s just that I feel it’d be better if users spread out more rather than only amassing in the larger instances.
I used lemmy.world as the default for non-technical users or for folks who can’t decide. Users can still select different instances. Maybe it could make sense to default sign ups to a list of popular instances
I like this, it’s impressive. Will there be an app we could move to or is it just web based for now?
Web based for now. IOS and Android apps are in the works!
Is this foss if so where ia source code. Second does this need to be its own ui or could it be modified to work as a proxy between a 3rd party client and a lemmy instance? Otherwise how hard would it be to implement into eternity?
looks Nice
What a super cool idea, and I love the implementation! I do however keep accidentally downvoting, when I want to upvote, and vice versa, since all other sites that I’ve ever used, display the upvote first, and the downvote second. Any chance of a toggle for that in settings?
A must-have feature for me is the ability to collapse comments on posts. Right now it seems like we can only collapse replies to comments, or put differently, we can only collapse child-comments. Any chance you could make it possible to collapse parent comments too?
Thank you so much! And I just made a note on the voting arrow order. I like the idea of making that an option in settings
And I can look into collapsing parent comments too. As you pointed out, I made it so just child comments collapse. The idea to collapse the parent comment never occurred to me lol
I’ll see if I can work both of these features into the next release.
You’re an absolute champ! Wishing you all the best with this project going forward, and I look forward to using it more :)
Just a quick follow up here - I added a simple toggle setting to Quiblr that lets you flip the arrow order.
Apologies for the slow roll out, I had a big laundry list of updates in this latest release!
Wow, I appreciate you following up! I can just imagine how much you had to get through. Cheers!
It’s my pleasure! Enjoy!
Nice UI work. I’ll wait for it to be open-sourced before I use it to login to my account.
Could this somehow be upstreamed into a new sort to be built into Lemmy? That would be pretty cool.
Is it opwn source? Would love to see it on mastodon and other apps
This is insanely good!
This is excellent! Thanks. Anyway to self host? I dont want to bog down your system.
Quiblr is a frontend, so you are not bogging down my system :) It is designed to run on whichever Instance you use
Wow, this looks cool and useful, but since it’s the first time I know about Quiblr I have to ask, what is it? I feel like it’s a frontend to any lemmy instance? This fediverse world is cool but the many layers of this onion confuse me a little. I like the look and feel of the site! I think this feature of “For You” would be useful to other federated projects. In “reddit-like” projects I don’t see much use because my feed on that app was from things I followed, but in things like peertube or youtube alternatives, a “recommended” page is a thing that I miss! It could be awesome if this feature could be implemented in other federated projects.
Hi, Im glad you like Quiblr! It is a frontend. It currently supports Lemmy Instances. So you can use Quiblr and browse/join any other Lemmy instance. Basically, it is the equivalent of a Reddit client
And I agree that the recommendation algorithm perhaps has a more ideal fit with other content. But I liked the idea of something new and novel by mixing Lemmy’s Reddit-style with a Youtube/Instagram-style recommendation feed.
Let me know if any other questions or feedback come up!
that’s cool!
