Popular fediverse topics from my corner of the social web
-
Okay, here's a little completely unintentional side-effect that blew my mind.
tl;dr — never miss a popular post again.
NodeBB tracks a number of metrics when the internal methods are called to create topics (or post replies). Metrics such as post counts, vote counts, view counts. It uses those to provide alternative sorting of topic lists — by post, votes, and views.
Incoming content from the fediverse/social web is also run through this same logic, and so those metrics ended up tracked too.
One of our users pointed out that remote topics were drowning out local topics in the
/popularroute, which makes sense given the imbalance in traffic. Unintentional, but not problematic. I tweaked the logic to filter out those topics unless explicitly asked for.... and I ended up with this page, which allows you to see popular fediverse topics that my instance knows about. You can even drill down by day, week, month, or all time.
A common fediverse concern is that things get missed. If you live several time zones away from somebody else, you may never see their content pop up naturally in your feed. Trending posts (in Mastodon) addresses this somewhat, though.
It seems without any additional effort, NodeBB has already taken a step towards resolving this issue.
-
Initially, the pseudo-category was called "World". I renamed them "Uncategorized" recently to better reflect that they don't currently belong in one of the organized categories on the forum.
It's not meant to be a degradation of the importance of the topic, but merely that it is coming from elsewhere and subject to pruning, which is the main differentiator.
As you can imagine, there's a lot of content streaming in from the social web, and not all of it is relevant, or read, or even seen. While we don't prune content yet, all of it does take up space, so eventually, topics that are not categorized will be purged unless it has had some form of interaction (e.g. a reply was made from a local user, one of the posts got upvoted, etc.)
"Uncategorized" also open up possibilities in the future. Perhaps you have a plugin that enabled you to create your own blog posts or status updates. If we didn't have this category, then most plugins would end up creating their own data structures. Now, those could be posted as topics in the Uncategorized category because that's what they are — uncategorized.
-
@julian This is fascinating! And a really cool way to experience the fediverse
-
@julian Ha-ha, unexpected AND cool
(to illustrate better: https://community.nodebb.org/popular?cid[]=-1 )But, I like the "World" better. Maybe, something like "Outside World" would be better. Just "Uncategorized" sounds like that garbage folder you have on your desktop that you only add to but otherwise never touch.
-
@julian maybe using "unsorted" instead of "uncategorized" can help with the negative perception, or something like "unlabeled"...
alternatively, if you are adventurous enough, it can be something like "fediverse aggregate", "fediverse agora" or something like "networked agora" ...
-
@crazycells labels are to tags as X are to categories?
It could just be the coloration too... let me just change it to black on white and that may make all the difference.
-
J julian referenced this topic on
-
@crazycells the topic list should load additional topics when you near the end. Maybe you have pagination enabled?
-
@crazycells thanks, maybe the popular route does not support pagination... Do you see pagination when you filter by other categories?
-
@crazycells ok no problem. I will remove the /world/all page then
-
nope, it is not the same...
/world/alldoes not show pagination...https://community.nodebb.org/recent?cid[]=-1 shows this:
https://community.nodebb.org/world/all shows this:
-
@crazycells that's correct. Content wise they're identical, so if /world/all doesn't show pagination then I will just remove it altogether.
-
@crazycells I do not like repeated logic, as it adds maintenance burden. I will be removing it regardless
