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] 85 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Without it being open source and not providing reproducible builds, the privacy claims are borderline weightless.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Agree, but anyone competent could just sniff the traffic. (Or hopefully, lack thereof)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

For sure. What the aforementioned bits of information provide is the ability to be confident in the privacy of software if one were to treat it as a black box, ie an average consumer.

[–] warmaster 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This. For all we know, the app could be doing all kinds of nefarious things and we wouldn't be able to tell.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Hm, I feel that it's inaccurate to say "we wouldn't be able to tell". It's not exactly a black box system — the app would have to run on an operating system, and if you are able to know what the operating system is doing, and what instructions are being executed by the CPU, then you can know exactly what the app is doing.

What the aforementioned bits of information provide is the ability to treat software as a black box and be sure of its safety without having to fundamentally audit it.

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

even if it's open source, how would you verify that the instance is running that version of the software?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Fair point. I believe I was under the impression that this was an app rather than a served webpage. I suppose one can easily verify this by looking at how the "For You" algorithm works within the browser — all the code for functionality would be sent to the browser; though, it could potentially be obfuscated, which might be a pain.