I made a Lemmy instance with a custom algorithm that keeps only the top 20% most unique (=interesting?) posts. It does this by calculating a similarity score between every post on my instance and all posts that came before it. The top 80% of posts with the highest self-similarity get removed instantly.
The idea would be that this allows me to cut through the noise that’s running through the communities, similar to how xkcd-signal attempted to do 20 years ago.
The instance is mostly meant for reading, not posting. So it has a very open federation policy (for now).
If anything, this is experimental. So please let me know what you think! You can see the type of stuff that gets removed in the modlog (https://lemmy.coffee/modlog).
This is very interesting. I’ve been thinking of how a similar but different system could be implemented. The front page of any instance always seems to have two to four posts by the same person, and I’ve been following a rule that if I notice it I block them to remove their clutter of posts from my feed. Unfortunately, most of these accounts are brand new ones posting memes, so it feels like for every two I swat down, four more take their place.
I was looking for an instance that allowed me to mute all new accounts, or less likely an instance that filters out posts by the same person, but it doesn’t seem such a thing has been created.
This isn’t the same that I wanted, and if I’m not mistaken it only applies to posts inside this instance, since the algorithm is removing them? Or does it filter out all similar posts across the fediverse feed? Still, it’s close in concept.
PieFed places an icon next to the username to help highlight such aspects of a person’s account. The one for “new account, less than 2 weeks old” is very useful. Others need tweaking such as “potential unregistered bot that posts far more often than comments”, and “contentious user with far more downvotes than upvotes”. I find it useful not to block people but to simply scroll past or to tailor my response to knowing that info.
In addition to PieFed, there are some Lemmy apps that will do this too, although I am not sure which ones (perhaps check out Sync and Connect) - the trick here is ofc to auto apply it to all accounts as you read through your feed.