Making the fediverse accessible to all with Quiblr!

  • 7 Posts
  • 67 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 29th, 2023

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  • Lots of great feedback. I’ll try to address each:

    • I tried to differentiate voting vs. “like/dislike” for the algorithm as to not confuse users who think they are logged in. I can put more thought into how to make this a bit more intuitive
    • Quiblr is built as a progress web app (PWA) so it uses native app components. The benefit is that it is faster and easier to manage multiple code bases. But the con is that it doesn’t have all the same benefits as HTML. I added an “open posts in new tab” feature in the settings
    • I like the idea of added more body text in the post itself. My fear was that it would make the feed look too crowded, but I can take second look at it
    • I love the tooltips idea
    • The 3 dot ellipses has a Post Detail section for each post. Maybe this could be a good place to add the link back to the original Instance url.
    • I like the scrollbar idea. I think this could make sense as an optional setting because I personally don’t prefer the scroll bar but I want to include it for users who do prefer it
    • I added a refresh button for users using the PWA version (since they don’t have a refresh button in the browser). Maybe something like “pull down to refresh” could work on
    • You should be able to press the “<” back button when viewing a community on mobile or just back in your browser. Both should take you back to your feed. Let me know if it isn’t working as intended
    • I’ll have to see the API allows for removing downvoted items from feeds. I can try to get creative if needed

    Edit: Added tooltips for post buttons + original url on the Post Detail page. I will continue to update this comment as I work through other additions in this list





  • 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 built the Quiblr web app. I love the idea of being able to filter results for a given instance! I will see if I can push an update tonight

    Edit: I pushed an update to implement Advanced Search options on the Communities Page. Given how the API works, community IDs are different between each Instance so you can’t view the post feed on another Instance’s community -but- I made a solution that lets you VIEW the communities on different instances (regardless of your home instance). If you are not signed in, you can change the instance with a single button push.

    Hope your friend finds this feature helpful!




  • After speaking with non-technical friends, I began to think how the key to marketing, onboarding, and growth will be to reduce the friction of the fediverse. The technical aspects of the fediverse (such as instances) and even the word “fediverse” itself should be behind a curtain.

    Unfortunately, Lemmy’s current default frontend does not do a good job at welcoming non-technical users (i.e. needing to find and select instances, fediverse jargon, etc.). Not to mention the lack of common accessibility features

    Ultimately, I think the 3rd party devs building accessible and frictionless frontends will be key in this respect.

    With that being said, I think a better marketing strategy is to say “join this app” (which connects them to the Lemmy/Mastodon network) because I imagine the bounce rate of the default Lemmy onboarding is not great.