On: Call for Developer Projects

[tomjen3]

I find that I want the opposite of the firehose: I want the thoughtful and smart people, and I want it to be about their interests.

I did sign up for bluesky, but it has the same failure as twitter: I don't want to hear about your politics just because I follow you.

I wish there was a way to force users to use 1 hashtag per post and then I could unfollow hashtags - but I suspect it would be playing wack-a-mole.

Really anything that aims to replace twitter should be forced to not optimize for engagement.

[bsnnkv → tomjen3]

> I wish there was a way to force users to use 1 hashtag per post and then I could unfollow hashtags - but I suspect it would be playing wack-a-mole.

I built something like this in a slightly different context for myself.

I doubt it'll ever really catch on widely, but I have a bunch of people who want to read my highlights about tech and nothing else who appreciate my software dev feed.[1]

[1]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development

[snthpy → bsnnkv]

I was thinking something similar. I want to post #PRQL #dataBS #DataEngineering #OpenSource #Excel #PowerQuery ... I assume each of my followers is only interested in a subset of those tags. I've been considering setting up separate accounts that probably fragments too much.

Great thing about Bluesky is that you can easily create your own custom feeds so I guess we can just start doing it and see if it catches on.

1: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds

[bsnnkv → snthpy]

So I actually just went ahead and made the thing[1] for Bluesky.

https://blucerne.app

[simonw → tomjen3]

Gemini 1.5 Flash 8B is so cheap now that you could build your own little custom Bluesky reader that filters out political tweets for you based on LLM classification. It would probably cost less than a dollar a month.

[kkarakk → tomjen3]

Not only do bluesky users(skeeters? did that catch on?) not tag posts correctly they do that "anti censorship" thing where they share a screenshot of a post so you are guaranteed to see things you don't care about.

[guu → kkarakk]

You can use a labeler[0] to classify social media screenshots and hide them.

[0]: https://xblock.aendra.com/getting-started/

[add-sub-mul-div → kkarakk]

There's a culture of encouraging alt text on images, and muting keywords works on the alt text.

[kkarakk → add-sub-mul-div]

yeah no regular user is ever gonna bother using alt texts and bluesky will not implement AI auto generated alt texts so i doubt this works at all

[darraghmckay → tomjen3]

A friend of mine built something[1] that should solve this problem, you subscribe to a tag of a person (or multiple) but not their full feed.

You can still add multiple tags per post, say if it's about music and technology, and if you subscribe to their technology tag, you'll see the post.

[1] https://lynkmi.com

[tayo42 → tomjen3]

Following a hash tag is basically what reddit is

[add-sub-mul-div → tomjen3]

You can mute keywords whether they're hashtags or not.

[esperent → add-sub-mul-div]

I tried doing that with Twitter a few years ago in an attempt to reduce the amount of posts related to US politics. I don't follow any political figures or commentators, only tech people and artists, but about half the posts on my feed were about US politics.

Although I ended up with a blocklist of around 100 words it was very much a losing battle and a waste of time.

[tomjen3 → add-sub-mul-div]

But if people are forced to pick a hashtag, then they will want to correlate around one hashtag. So many things could be releated to politics.