I think there’s a need for a social media platform that allows users to create multiple customizable feeds tailored to their specific, fluid interests over time.

On sites like Twitter or Mastodon, you mainly just have one feed based on the people or tags you follow. The problem is, to get a whole new customized feed, you’d need to make an entirely new account on these platforms.

On sites like Reddit or Lemmy, there are a few feeds predefined for each community, new, hot, top, etc. This doesn’t offer anything in terms of individual user customization.

I envision a platform where each user can make as many different personalized feeds as they want based around interests that might change over time and the feed would change accordingly without having to start from zero. This could work only for people who opt-in since there are people who dislike this kind of algorithms.

I’m curious to hear any ideas or suggestions people have about how to implement customizable, evolving feeds for each person. And how many resources would it require, would it work on a federated network made of personal computers or would it require a large server?

  • thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    On Mastodon I do have two accounts for my two main interests. But each account has some kind of “event” it joins in with once a week, that’s different to the usual content. For those days I just use lists to create custom feeds and switch between them as necessary, no reason you couldn’t expand that system to follow your ever-changing whims. (Edit: and now that you can exclude the members of a list from your home feed it’s got even better)

    Tbh on Reddit I’d never even heard of multireddits despite using the site for like a decade. Not sure how that one slipped by me. But turns out it is a useful feature, so until we get it built in to Lemmy core I keep the Summit app installed on my phone and have some custom multicommunities set up on there for the weekly event stuff too.

    Not the slickest solutions in the world (especially the Lemmy once since it makes it phone-only). But technically this is already something you have a decent amount of control over if you put the time into setting it up.