this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Today as I was searching for interesting communities to join I suddenly became saddened as I remembered this app that I spent hours using. StumbleUpon. When it was young it was the app I spent the most time on waiting between classes. just finding something interesting was always worth it.

The app is not what it used to be. I went to stumbleupon.com just to see and its all corporate. I'm sad because I kinda want StumbleUpon for the fediverse. Maybe I don't want to search for hours looking for communities to join, mastodon users to follow, or pixelfed instances that may have great photos. Maybe I want StumbleUpon for the Fediverse. I could connect it with any federated account, stumble upon something interesting, and subscribe. How could we go about building that?

What are your thoughts?

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[–] silicea 42 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This might be a little throwback: https://wiby.me/surprise/

Every time you open the link you will be forwarded to a random Web 1.0 homepage. There are many great gems to discover.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Amazing. I clicked it and was sent here:

http://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/

Which I found quite interesting. Thanks for this! I am going to click on it some more

[–] flipthetube 3 points 1 year ago

All you ever wanted to know about…

Pork Rinds!

Love it, thanks.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, this is a bunch of fun. Takes me back. Thanks for posting!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Stumbleupon was great because the internet was great. Not so much anymore.

But something like that for the fediverse could be cool. Unfortunately there are a lot of more pressing features that need to be added, so that one might take a while.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People tend to post things to talk about here, and there’s not so much “interesting” stuff and more memes/news. The thing about Stumbleupon was that it was curated in a very particular way. I don’t think the internet is anything less than it was, it’s just harder to find the good stuff.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

That's fair. But it's also becoming so hard to find the good stuff that I think you have to acknowledge that the internet as a whole is lesser. Even if everything from 15 years ago were still on the internet (and it's certainly not), the addition of a mountain of shit has still caused the average quality of content to drop precipitously.

[–] IanM32 19 points 1 year ago

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.

A long time.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm intrigued and in a position to build something like this.

Let's talk details. So there's ~2k Lemmy servers right now, probably like the top 100 are worth looking at. I can connect to any server and list communities and non-nsfw posts (regardless of if you have an account there). I can use their search box or use any of their sorting methods, and I could exclude anything from communities you're a part of, but I can't just pull something out randomly

So I could go to a server, grab the top local post for the day that links somewhere, I could pick a random community by hot or active, I could look for a library that will give me keywords to search and give you a list of sorted results across many servers

I guess I could also find how many communities they have, pick a random number, and check if that one has more than 5 users (if not, reroll)

Thoughts or suggestions?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Sounds interesting, let me know if you ever follow this idea and make something, I'd be willing to check it out

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Thanks! I just spent the last 2 hours reading random math and science articles. Mostly blog posts.

Notable ones I read:

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Its not exactly for the Fediverse but you can try Cloudhiker. Has a similar function and you can choose the types of sites you want it to show.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I still have a loooooong bookmark folder of gems from StumbleUpon

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I use https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] to find new communities on Lemmy. There’s also a community that uses a bot to post trending communities: https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

It was nice indeed

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

That shit was dangerous

[–] BadApe 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I am new to fediverse / lemmy as well. The traverse menu in the Memmy app at least lists out other communities to explore. Not quite stumble upon, but still useful.

I’m just waiting for more people to leave Reddit I think. Sort of surprised that more expel haven’t.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The Reddit communities are opening back up and the mods are getting replaced. I don't think there will be many more Reddit refugees coming unless the company does something stupid again.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Unless?

More like until

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

Like withhold the official app icon behind premium?

[–] flipthetube 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I’ve been surprised that so many people are completely fine with Reddit shitting on their faces, but then I remember how mainstream it got over the years and it makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah many of the newer redditors are predisposed to eating shit, and many of the medium term redditors haven't yet realized how full of shit reddit actually is.

It's sh.it all the way down.

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

Remember, most people there are passively consuming content and don’t care. It’s when the content dries up or becomes boring they will leave. The problem then will be that they go to Instagram, TikTok or Twitter instead of Lemmy.

[–] luminaree 5 points 1 year ago

Same! It's what led me to find Reddit a long time ago.

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

I'm not a big sports fan but the majority of my friends are. That app got me through hours and hours of sportsball. I adored it and I still think about it.

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

I do miss it too, but I also don't think I would still enjoy it today