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.
From what I can tell, the larger instances have frontpages without much user duplication. They have a LOT more memes than I do tho :)
https://imgur.com/a/xbzMXmQ
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.
I would still argue that thunder is the best app for lemmy
https://github.com/thunder-app/thunder
Really, if you don't mind my asking, why is that? Or do you know somewhere that offers a feature comparison? I seem to hear people saying that more for Voyager than Thunder, and both are FOSS. My own only super brief look seemed to confirm that in some few ways like display of full images in the former whereas in the latter it will only show like a third and then you have to click and wait for it to load to see the rest. However, I have only tried Thunder without logging in, so I guess I'll give it my account credentials and try it out again:-).
Maybe I misremember but didn't voyager have ads? That was a turn off for me.
Or maybe that was boost?
That sounds like Boost. Voyager is FOSS.
I want to like Thunder, and I'm sure there's all sorts of reasons to, I just haven't seen any of them yet:-).
My mistake then. I have to give Voyager another try, I guess :)