Today, I wanted to introduce you to Categories - a new feature that is essentially a multi-mags view. A new tab will appear in the user panel where you can create categories (public or private) and then add magazines to them (local or remote). In the magazine listing, there will be another tab that will list public categories created by users (which can be liked - in the future, this will transform into a subscription form). In the category view, all filters and sorting options are applied, and it also collaborates with the Aggregate view.
Additionally, I’ve patched several annoying bugs - media preview from comments by clicking the icon, improved navigation in the aggregate view, remote magazine listing in the content submission form, and a few others.
These changes will be implemented on the instance tonight. With this note, I conclude the month, and starting tomorrow, I’ll be 100% focused on developing the new ActivityPub module and matters related to instance moderation.
You can track changes in the official repository
https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core
or on Github
https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin
Will there be a way for communities to opt-out from being listed in a category?
I think there is a lot of abuse potential in this and even if well intended, a single word or so can’t really describe what communities are about, and as a result those categories (similar to the “all” feed) will bring a lot of off-topic comments and trolling from people not engaged with the communities at all otherwise.
On Mastodon with hashtags the original poster can at least make a conscious choice of being listed under it or not. But this seems fully third party driven and I fear it will increase moderation workload significantly.
I don’t understand how content grouping can be used for potential abuses, to be honest. Collections are related to the user, so it will be subject to instance moderation in case of such an attempt. The community can also switch to private mode - then this content will not be aggregated in collections. Moreover, from what I know, there are already external tools that do similar things.
Most trolling and brigading is fairly low effort, and having a sharable collection of communities to troll makes it much easier to organize lots of people to do just that. Edit: yes external tools for that exist but having it built in makes it much easier to abuse and rope in people to do the trolling that otherwise would not bother.
But my main concern is that this isn’t opt-in for communities. Having a sharable and subscribable link with for example “meme” communities means that all of them are seeing a constant barrage of random people commenting that are not members of that community and do not have any idea what the community is about other than that it is somewhat loosely related to “memes”. It basically hides everything that is vital about the communities and actively damages attempts at community building.
Edit: my concern is mainly about public, sharable collections, if people want to make their own private collections that seems like a nice feature to have.
I understand now, I’ll think it over during the weekend. I haven’t really considered it before because the fediverse is still a relatively small and close-knit community imo. Excluding a specific instance would likely involve PR proposal to Lemmy’s repository, but that’s fine. Thanks for the feedback.