The All-Feed is very important to increase the content-quality of the threadiverse and therefore, ensure its existense. However, for smaller instances, there is only limited reason to put the All-Feed prominent in their UI, because their posts will never be present there. However, if they push people toward their the Local-Feed (which they currently do), people will only stay on their instance and overall discussion quality declines.
So, to truly overcome instance protectionism, we need a new feed, in which an instance can find a good balance between showing content from other instances and its own.
What is the incentive for instance owners to push people toward the local feed vs the all feed?
I’m not entirely sure what they meant. There are three settings: All, Subscribed, Local. Instance owners have to choose which is the default for their instance. Neither is “pushing” anything.
For themed instances, it makes sense to emphasize their local feed. For generic instances, not so much. Either way, users can choose another setting anytime, or even set their own default.
I’m basically just suggesting a feed that takes the Local and All feed, and merges it 50/50. Meaning you have the posts in the order in which you would normally see them but in the same feed. And its not like first a Local post, then an All post, then the next Local post but a bit more shaked up: for each post in the list, a coin is thrown if the next local or all post is picked.
I see, thanks. Presented this way, I like the idea much more. I generally like the idea to customize my own feed. So I’d like to take it a step further: Let me choose the numbers. 50/50 seems like a good predefined starting point though.
Also I wouldn’t stop there but include Subscribed. So while your settings might be 0/50/50 for Subscribed/Local/All, mine would be 70/20/10, and the next guy could choose something entirely different.
Similarly, I’d like to control how much weight small communities get in these feeds. And I’d like to say “whenever something is posted to this specific community, show it to me! No matter how much other interesting content there is from other communities.”
I love that! Just made a post about it …
Honestly, the problem with discovery is not that there are not enough posts in a single timeline. Merging local and global feeds makes discoverability worse on Lemmy and kbin, not better, because the timelines display posts, while the space is organized by communities. This means that smaller or niche communities just drown seas of posts from large or highly active ones.
If you want a real “exploration” timeline, you need one that limits the number of posts from any given community. And that still seems like it’s well served by local/global splits, because the website you join should be meaningful.
We do not need, nor should we want, a network of “dumb terminal” Fediverse sites. We should be aiming for the local stream to be the big selling point for any given instance, with the ability to interact with remote communities being a value-add. A merged timeline kills local identity, and tells users that their hosting website is a 2nd class citizen in the Fediverse.
If you want a real “exploration” timeline, you need one that limits the number of posts from any given community. And that still seems like it’s well served by local/global splits, because the website you join should be meaningful.
That should be given by the sorting-algo you chose. Merging local and all is additional to that so that you don’t have to skip back and forth all the time.
No we don’t.
One of the fundamental strengths of a federated approach is that I can, with no muss or fuss, see only my local instance.
I understand where you’re coming from, but you’re presuming that most instances are simply clones of each other, and that’s not true. (or at least that’s not how it’s designed to be).
For example, my home instance is mstdn.ca. Ostensibly, with a single button, I can focus my entire Lemmy experience on things important to me as a Canadian without wasting through everyone else’s bullshit. Canadian news. Canadian politics. Canadian hobbies, etc…
You’re idea presumes that all instances are trying to carry the exact same content, which is false.
This is a suggestion for a new feed option, not a replacement for the existing one. Nobody’s trying to take your local feed away from you
I’m basically just suggesting a feed that takes the Local and All feed, and merges it 50/50. Meaning you have the posts in the order in which you would normally see them but its not like first a Local post, then an All post, then the next Local post but a bit more shaked up.
