[HN Gopher] A better Mastodon client?
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A better Mastodon client?
Author : tkellogg
Score : 82 points
Date : 2023-12-19 15:12 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (timkellogg.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (timkellogg.me)
| sigmar wrote:
| I like the concept of "social media delivers a dumb feed, then my
| device groups and organizes them." In line with what is written
| in the conclusion, I would love to use a client like this that
| also does curation (by floating topics to the top once it starts
| seeing which topics you click on most) and then allowing
| interrogation/tuning of these recommendations. Why use openai
| instead of a local model though? (I'd imagine
| mistral-8x7-instruct would do well with the summarization task)
| ekianjo wrote:
| mistal 7b base model is good enough for summarization. No need
| to go to the 8x7 one.
| tkellogg wrote:
| OP here. Yeah, it's also extremely low-risk. The sensitive
| part of the algorithm is the embeddings. This part is just
| making the group human readable.
|
| The reason I didn't do mistral the first time is because I'm
| lazy. I gave myself 3-4 hours to get a first pass done, and
| getting a local model running seemed unnecessarily difficult.
| It would be a great addition though.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Each device being sent the firehose does not scale. You need
| another service to at least do the candidate generation from
| the firehose to get a reasonable rate for your device to
| handle.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I have a system that filters RSS feeds like this, out of 7000
| articles it might pick 300 to show me, it takes just a few
| minutes to build and validate a model on a rather powerful PC
| so so far performance is not a problem.
|
| If I were wanting to offer this kind of service to other
| people I know I could get an economy of scale just ingesting
| RSS feeds once, I think a lot of users might be happier
| sampling items from the firehose instead of curating a feed
| list, and I'd probably give up on the pure content-based
| filtering and include some collaborative filtering because
| people would perceive that it learns faster.
| greggyb wrote:
| That is exactly what is happening here. The Mastodon server
| is handling the firehose, and creating sub-streams for each
| user based on followed accounts and tags.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Video streaming seems like a firehose.
|
| Do you mean the battery could not handle the LLM?
| NewsyHacker wrote:
| Is unlimited user-end filtration and sorting seen as compatible
| with the spirit of Mastodon? Members of the Mastodon founding
| generation have sometimes expressed a wish for that founding
| generation to always remain visible and prominent, even as the
| user base expands. Part of it is that the founding generation
| is heavily trans, and they don't want their identities and
| voices to be drowned out by wider cis society.
| hernantz wrote:
| I crave for social media clients that allow users to customize
| their ranking algorithms for their feed.
| cmiller1 wrote:
| Without giving raw access to the database wouldn't this be a
| feature of the platform and not the client?
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| The user could choose weights in specific categories, that
| the app could then take into account when building lists.
| ekianjo wrote:
| depends entirely on how much the server API can provide in
| terms of granularity. Hence allowing the clients to do more
| than now.
| Hamuko wrote:
| https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/7-27-2023-custom-feeds
| dawnerd wrote:
| Nothing really stopping a mastodon client from hacking that
| together. Was thinking about this over the last couple weeks as
| well, even being able to specify a weight account you follow
| would be huge.
| lanstin wrote:
| Just limiting high volume posters to some limited percentage
| of the feed would be cool.
| superkuh wrote:
| The mastodon client I really want is my web browser. I want my
| web browser to be able to go to a mastodon web server and see
| HTML of posts (and responses! so no, /embed is not a solution)
| with actual text. This traditional form of interface was removed
| in most mastodon implementations from version 3 and on for some
| reason. Requiring execution of complex code, either in the
| browser as javascript, or on your computer as a native client, is
| not cool. At least for twitter there's nitter but there's no easy
| way to read mastodon posts/threads.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I'm guessing you mean "without having to log in"? Otherwise I'd
| suggest Brutaldon might fit your needs.
|
| (and someone could very well tweak Brutaldon to work in a
| logged-out mode, I suppose)
| superkuh wrote:
| Yes, without having to set up an account and log in. Like a
| normal webpage on a normal website.
| timdiggerm wrote:
| All the AI generated illustrations used in this post appear to
| show a wooly mammoth and not a mastodon. Here is a nice
| comparison; the mastodon is on the right:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon#/media/File:MammothVs...
| mplewis wrote:
| This is too bad, because I felt the ai images really took away
| from the content of the post.
| tkellogg wrote:
| OP here. Sorry you had that experience. I recently started
| doing it. Prior to the AI images, I got a lot of complaints
| about a "wall of text", so I was looking for a way to break
| it up, but also not invested enough to spend much time on it.
| AI images gives me a sort of 2-for-1, in that I get decent
| visuals, as well as accurate alt text. idk, maybe i should
| back off a bit. Suggestions welcome.
| ptx wrote:
| The text seemed nicely broken up by the headings already,
| but maybe adding some syntax-colored code snippets (where
| relevant) would be another way to add some color to the
| visuals.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| If I may be a bit of a curmudgeon for a moment: I've read
| some number of posts like this recently that had AI-
| generated art embedded to "break it up", and I've found
| that the effect is _skim_ _skim_ _squint at AI image_
| _skim_ _squint at AI image_ _scroll to end_
|
| Partly this is because a fun game with AI images is to
| identify the weird things they do. They have an interesting
| effect where they look sooooort of okay if you don't
| actually _look_ at them. In your post for instance, the
| first image has a wild not-actually-a-pteranodon at left,
| second image has twins at bottom-right but also is that a
| caveman partying with antlers on his head in the
| background?, third image -- what contraption is that wooly
| mammoth pulling, actually?
|
| And, once the novelty of playing "Find Ten Things Wrong
| With This Picture" wears off, then the images are exactly
| equivalent to embedded stock photography from Shutterstock
| or whatever. Oh look, it's shiny happy people at computers
| in the middle of an otherwise interesting essay on the
| transformer architectures of large language models.
|
| (I enjoyed the rest of the content of your post. Amazing
| how effectively these tools are becoming productivity
| multipliers for the people experimenting with them.)
| dharmab wrote:
| In this post, you're describing software that has a UI. How
| about some more screenshots or videos of it?
|
| Also, I know most readers are on mobile, but your site is
| _tiny_ on a desktop monitor.
| iteratethis wrote:
| Although it's early days, Bluesky has promising features
| regarding feed optimization. Users can build custom feeds and
| share them, you have control over sorting, etc.
|
| I like their moderation approach as well, at least its potential.
| You can indicate yourself how comfortable you are regarding
| various potentially harmful topics: hide/warn/show.
|
| I think this type of user control is exactly what social media
| needs. The power placed in the hands of users.
| ixwt wrote:
| As you said, it's early days. That's all subject to change.
| Especially if it goes public.
| TillE wrote:
| The most promising thing about Bluesky is that engagement seems
| surprisingly high. Posts from the larger accounts I follow get
| maybe 2000 likes on Twitter, 1000 on Bluesky, and 10 on
| Mastodon.
|
| I really hope they manage to federate themselves with the
| larger ecosystem in one way or another, it's annoying that
| they've chosen to not use ActivityPub.
| sdsd wrote:
| If anyone has an invite, I really want to join but don't know
| anyone who's already using it.
| james_pm wrote:
| Emailed.
| sdsd wrote:
| Thank you! At first glance, Bluesky seems great. I like X
| and don't care about Musk or problematic speech, but
| Bluesky is showing me accounts I like, whereas it's hard
| to convince Twitter to show me content I want to see.
|
| Maybe it's just that Bluesky's current userbase is
| stronger, pre eternal September. Anyway, I really
| appreciated your generosity.
|
| I promise to be diligent about posting, so as to honor
| your invite. I will behave. Unlike on X, where I'll
| continue being completely insane lol.
| ft_TI-84 wrote:
| I don't suppose you have another invite kicking
| around.... :)
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| Be careful with engagement stats on Mastodon, only the origin
| server will show all the likes and boosts.
| Hamuko wrote:
| What's the technical advantage of ActivityPub over AT
| Protocol?
| Aissen wrote:
| Very interesting, IMHO one of Mastodon's biggest advantage is not
| the reverse-order timeline, but the ability to build your own
| timeline view, pick your own algorithms. There are already a few
| frontend-based solutions. This one is another, and quite
| interesting.
|
| I only wish the (vastly underfunded) Mastodon team would see this
| as an opportunity to provide server-computed timelines to prevent
| clients from fetching too much information just to get their own
| summary.
| jp57 wrote:
| I'd like to see a client with a set of features to enable manual
| feed curation. I think it's possible with maybe just two missing
| features:
|
| 1. Mark as read: the ability to mark posts, threads, or followed
| users as read. Your feed only shows unread stuff. Threads would
| become unread if they get new posts in them.
|
| 2. Prioritization of Following: You can sort your Following list
| in any order and unread messages and threads are presented in
| that order.
|
| I use essentially this method with my work Slack, which has a
| "sorted like your sidebar" option for the Unreads. I have a bunch
| of folders for different priority channels and individuals, with
| my immediate team, reports, and boss and the topics I work on at
| the top, various company wide stuff at the bottom, and a some of
| grades in between containing channels for my department and
| partners. As soon as I set it up this way it improved my Slack
| productivity and I started wishing I could sort Mastodon and
| Twitter this way.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I use k-means clustering to find topics using mpnet. I've done
| similar things with other kinds of document vectors and never had
| so much success.
|
| It is good for classification too and used in my YOShInOn smart
| RSS reader which I sometimes think of pointing at Mastodon.
| leblancfg wrote:
| Good for you for reaching HN frontpage, Tim! This from a guy also
| on fosstodon =) Love the low-tech prototype.
|
| There exists a future where this kind of social media content
| curation is a viable and bootstrappable startup option. I'd like
| to live in that future.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Head to GitLab, click 'New Repository', write a new mastodon
| client, post the link here.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| Slightly off topic: I like that the SQLite database file is
| called "fossil", because fossil is both relevant to mastodons and
| is the name of the source code management system for SQLite.
| That's a fun intersection there.
| eikenberry wrote:
| For federated systems like this why are there clients and
| servers... shouldn't they all be using a single system that
| stores all that user content locally and uses federation to
| communicate to others? I don't get why you'd want an account on
| someone else's server when you can be running your own.
| rainonmoon wrote:
| Running your own server is laborious and adds risk. Some people
| want to take that on. Lots don't.
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(page generated 2023-12-21 23:02 UTC)