I know that many people don’t like complex or intransparent recommendation algorithms.

Currently, there are “subscribed”, “local” and “all” categories (at least in the default lemmy web UI).

I would like to change this to include custom topics (“listings”). They are a custom way of choosing content (in case of Lemmy listings). In Lemmy, custom listings appear just like standard listings (API-wise), just that instead of “https://discuss.tchncs.de/?dataType=Post&listingType=Subscribed&sort=Active” you have “https: //discuss.tchncs.de/?dataType=Post&listingType=list:AAAA4865698@lemmy.world&sort=Active” or something.

Listings could either be lists of communities and other listings. Consider this simple text file to describe a listing for a memes-topic: (that contains 2 communities, everything on 1 domain, and another sub-listing)

c:memes@lemmy.world
c:memes@lemmy.ml
domain:memes.net
list:AAAA4865698@lemmy.world

Or they could take their data from an RSS stream or similar external source.

  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.deOPEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Yeah I’m personally tending to always separate data and processing.

    Data means you have an underlying data source (in lemmy’s case the set of all lemmy servers hosting lemmy communities), and a separate system that does search/recommendation based on the data.

    The search/recommendation system would not store any data itself, but only filter and sort and process the data from the underlying servers and communities.