this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Privacy

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16102424

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

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

So it's fully local right? That's a really awesome system then. I'd probably recommend encrypting the data but that's not really necessary

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yup, 100% completely local to your device alone

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I don't understand why nobody did it in the past. It makes the experience so much better for normal users. I hope this becomes mainstream. Btw does it have any automatic analytics cache cleaning or something like that (so it doesn't grow 20 gigs of it in a year)? If so, make sure it cleans it periodically and not immediately when a piece of data becomes unneeded. On low end devices frequent write/delete cycles can be an issue

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I can’t go into too much detail, I was working for a recognisable company who was dabbling in the Fediverse with a heavy lean towards empowering the users.

This was high on my list of demands. Along with fine grain controls for what metrics you opt into and what notifications you receive.

Project got gutted early this year.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

I appreciate the kind words. And yes, I included a mechanism to constantly refresh and clean up recommendations so that it doesn't use too much memory

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Is it just a front-end or are there backend changes?

I like it for the most part. I dislike that you can't find the real URL of anything though

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

All front-end.

And thanks for the feedback. Can you elaborate what you mean by "can't find the real URL of anything"?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (2 children)

So I opened the link and was scrolling through the front page and eventually saw a community that I'd never seen before, so I wanted to take a look. I opened it and couldn't see what instance it was hosted on. When I tried to share it to myself, it still wouldn't give me the original instance URL. I found that super frustrating.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Gotcha. That should be an easy addition. I'll see if I can push an update tonight!

Edit: I noted this in a separate comment, but I added the instance info to the communities page + the original post url to the Post Details page (via the 3 dot ellipses)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I pushed an update to Quiblr. I added the instance detail to the Communities page. Additionally, the vertical 3 dot ellipses on each post has an option called Post Detail >> I added the original post url here

Let me know if you have any additional feedback!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

OMG, that's so much better now. Thank you. It actually feels usable now.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

How do you pay for costs? Will there be donations or a premium feature?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I use Kofi for donations (button in the top bar). I build and pay for everything myself so support is appreciated!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Can you elaborate how and what actions will affect my feed? I don't quite understand how this works without any login as I can't vote or write comments. Also how do my subscriptions affect it if I'm logged in to an instance?

I do like it and would wish something like that as an app.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Never heard of Quiblr but I really like the look and feel of. Also great that you added a "For you page". Any chance you can add kbin/mbin instances? Is Quiblr like a frontend which pulls data from other instances or is it an other fediverse piece of software? And are we able to selfhost Quiblr?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Quiblr is purely a frontend. It creates a standardized experience across Instances (including the feed personalization). Im not super familiar with Kbin. If it uses the same API as Lemmy then it should work.

Long-term, I'd love to integrate more and more fediverse platforms into Quiblr

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

A dedicated webview on fdroid would be cool, for those of us that dont keep cookies and such

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Your browser should have an option for per-site cookie permissions.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Aaaand its empty. Intentionally.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

My list of places where I allow cookies

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yes, I know. That's the problem. Instead of asking for and installing an app, maybe just enable cookies for that site? That's far less intrusive.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The app shouldn't be intrusive, if its a good app

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

The point is, you're asking the dev to take the time to create and maintain an app, when you could just tick a box to enable cookies and use the PWA instead...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I'd like to see pixelfed when it gets lemmy compat

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Apologies for the late comment. So this is a full-fledged frontend like photon or alexandrite, but with this recommendation engine built in? On first glance, it looks so much more responsive and lightweight! I'm really wondering what you've done that other big frontends haven't lol, no broken images or anything! If you do end up going open source, I might consider actually contributing to something for once. I'd love to help build out some features.

Edit: After using it for a few minutes, wtf, it's snappier than lemmy itself. And the community search, wow! Maybe a pretty ui does something to perception, I dunno. I am assuming you have barrels of cache lol.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I appreciate all the kind words! You are correct that it is a frontend with recommendation engine built in. And the speed likely comes from being a progressive web app.

There are tradeoffs, but it definitely makes thinks "snappier" :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

How does it work? I was planning on importing a recommendation algorithm I made in the past for MAL for an upcoming fediverse summer project I was thinking of making that was also pretty much privacy-friendly. I'd like to know how you do the on device recommendation though. Since it's content based, do you download thousands of posts or something?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Images on the feed shrink when I try to zoom in on mobile. If I want to read the text on the image, I need to tap it once to open the post, then tap it again to open the image. At that point it fills the screen, but I still can’t zoom in any closer, it just bounces back.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

That is an effect of the dynamic sizing (adjusting the style for different screen dimensions) + it may be because the items are in a flatlist. I will add a dynamic image size setting option tonight to allow users to show the full image ratio rather than a standardized image size.

Edit: dynamic image size setting is now live

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

First app I guess, but running your own instance does the same thing, right?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Do you mean it downloads all the posts whether you read them or not? Is that basically running your own instance?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

No. Posts are not downloaded and Quiblr is purely a frontend (you can choose which instance you want to use). The algorithm basically crafts the relevant API calls to populate the For You feed with content that matches your usage preferences. Those preferences and metadata are all stored on your device

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Ah, so the "100% private" part is purely the recommendation engine.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I see what you mean. To clarify, Quiblr as a platform is also 100% private. It doesn't even use Google Analytics. The only data that I collect is anything submitted via the Feedback form + Umami for analytics .

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's a very nice feature of a pretty polished frontend I haven't heard of before, I'll be sure to try it out!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Let me know if you have any feedback!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Wow this is such a clean and snappy Lemmy client, may become my new daily driver!

The "For You" feed looks like it has a similar focus as the one I have on Agora, which is a webapp for following people across the "extended Fediverse" as I call it (Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Nostr).

The For You feed on Agora utilizes a fork of the open source FediAlgo library to create a feed that combines interesting posts from people you follow, as well as friends of friends, and it learns your preferences based on whose content you like/boost.

Agora: https://agorasocial.app

Source code: https://github.com/ghobs91/agora

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

🚩 Anti-libre software bans us from proving it’s claims. This is worse, service as a software substitute.