12 ms·

A better Mastodon client?

88 points by tkellogg 3y ago

sigmar 3y ago
I like the concept of "social media delivers a dumb feed, then my device groups and organizes them." In line with what is written in the conclusion, I would love to use a client like this that also does curation (by floating topics to the top once it starts seeing which topics you click on most) and then allowing interrogation/tuning of these recommendations. Why use openai instead of a local model though? (I'd imagine mistral-8x7-instruct would do well with the summarization task)
- ekianjo 3y ago
  mistal 7b base model is good enough for summarization. No need to go to the 8x7 one.
  - tkellogg 3y ago
    OP here. Yeah, it’s also extremely low-risk. The sensitive part of the algorithm is the embeddings. This part is just making the group human readable. The reason I didn’t do mistral the first time is because I’m lazy. I gave myself 3-4 hours to get a first pass done, and getting a local model running seemed unnecessarily difficult. It would be a great addition though.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  Each device being sent the firehose does not scale. You need another service to at least do the candidate generation from the firehose to get a reasonable rate for your device to handle.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    I have a system that filters RSS feeds like this, out of 7000 articles it might pick 300 to show me, it takes just a few minutes to build and validate a model on a rather powerful PC so so far performance is not a problem. If I were wanting to offer this kind of service to other people I know I could get an economy of scale just ingesting RSS feeds once, I think a lot of users might be happier sampling items from the firehose instead of curating a feed list, and I'd probably give up on the pure content-based filtering and include some collaborative filtering because people would perceive that it learns faster.
  - greggyb 3y ago
    That is exactly what is happening here. The Mastodon server is handling the firehose, and creating sub-streams for each user based on followed accounts and tags.
  - ganzuul 3y ago
    Video streaming seems like a firehose. Do you mean the battery could not handle the LLM?
- NewsyHacker 3y ago
  Is unlimited user-end filtration and sorting seen as compatible with the spirit of Mastodon? Members of the Mastodon founding generation have sometimes expressed a wish for that founding generation to always remain visible and prominent, even as the user base expands. Part of it is that the founding generation is heavily trans, and they don’t want their identities and voices to be drowned out by wider cis society.
  - mcv 3y ago
    Is the spirit of Mastodon that the site, rather than the user, decides what the user sees? That wouldn't make them much better than the commercial platforms. I absolutely want users to be in control of their feed, so I welcome projects like these. (I'm not actually on Mastodon but on Friendica, but I follow a lot of people on Mastodon.)
hernantz 3y ago
I crave for social media clients that allow users to customize their ranking algorithms for their feed.
- cmiller1 3y ago
  Without giving raw access to the database wouldn't this be a feature of the platform and not the client?
  - sonicanatidae 3y ago
    The user could choose weights in specific categories, that the app could then take into account when building lists.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    depends entirely on how much the server API can provide in terms of granularity. Hence allowing the clients to do more than now.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/7-27-2023-custom-feeds https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/7-27-2023-custom-feeds
- dawnerd 3y ago
  Nothing really stopping a mastodon client from hacking that together. Was thinking about this over the last couple weeks as well, even being able to specify a weight account you follow would be huge.
  - lanstin 3y ago
    Just limiting high volume posters to some limited percentage of the feed would be cool.
velcrovan 3y ago
[flagged]
superkuh 3y ago
The mastodon client I really want is my web browser. I want my web browser to be able to go to a mastodon web server and see HTML of posts (and responses! so no, /embed is not a solution) with actual text. This traditional form of interface was removed in most mastodon implementations from version 3 and on for some reason. Requiring execution of complex code, either in the browser as javascript, or on your computer as a native client, is not cool. At least for twitter there's nitter but there's no easy way to read mastodon posts/threads.
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  I'm guessing you mean "without having to log in"? Otherwise I'd suggest Brutaldon might fit your needs. (and someone could very well tweak Brutaldon to work in a logged-out mode, I suppose)
  - superkuh 3y ago
    Yes, without having to set up an account and log in. Like a normal webpage on a normal website.
timdiggerm 3y ago
All the AI generated illustrations used in this post appear to show a wooly mammoth and not a mastodon. Here is a nice comparison; the mastodon is on the right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon#/media/File:MammothVsMastodon.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon#/media/File:MammothVs...
- mplewis 3y ago
  This is too bad, because I felt the ai images really took away from the content of the post.
  - tkellogg 3y ago
    OP here. Sorry you had that experience. I recently started doing it. Prior to the AI images, I got a lot of complaints about a “wall of text”, so I was looking for a way to break it up, but also not invested enough to spend much time on it. AI images gives me a sort of 2-for-1, in that I get decent visuals, as well as accurate alt text. idk, maybe i should back off a bit. Suggestions welcome.
    - ptx 3y ago
      The text seemed nicely broken up by the headings already, but maybe adding some syntax-colored code snippets (where relevant) would be another way to add some color to the visuals.
    - thaumaturgy 3y ago
      If I may be a bit of a curmudgeon for a moment: I've read some number of posts like this recently that had AI-generated art embedded to "break it up", and I've found that the effect is skim skim squint at AI image skim squint at AI image scroll to end Partly this is because a fun game with AI images is to identify the weird things they do. They have an interesting effect where they look sooooort of okay if you don't actually look at them. In your post for instance, the first image has a wild not-actually-a-pteranodon at left, second image has twins at bottom-right but also is that a caveman partying with antlers on his head in the background?, third image -- what contraption is that wooly mammoth pulling, actually? And, once the novelty of playing "Find Ten Things Wrong With This Picture" wears off, then the images are exactly equivalent to embedded stock photography from Shutterstock or whatever. Oh look, it's shiny happy people at computers in the middle of an otherwise interesting essay on the transformer architectures of large language models. (I enjoyed the rest of the content of your post. Amazing how effectively these tools are becoming productivity multipliers for the people experimenting with them.)
iteratethis 3y ago
Although it's early days, Bluesky has promising features regarding feed optimization. Users can build custom feeds and share them, you have control over sorting, etc. I like their moderation approach as well, at least its potential. You can indicate yourself how comfortable you are regarding various potentially harmful topics: hide/warn/show. I think this type of user control is exactly what social media needs. The power placed in the hands of users.
- ixwt 3y ago
  As you said, it's early days. That's all subject to change. Especially if it goes public.
- TillE 3y ago
  The most promising thing about Bluesky is that engagement seems surprisingly high. Posts from the larger accounts I follow get maybe 2000 likes on Twitter, 1000 on Bluesky, and 10 on Mastodon. I really hope they manage to federate themselves with the larger ecosystem in one way or another, it's annoying that they've chosen to not use ActivityPub.
  - sdsd 3y ago
    If anyone has an invite, I really want to join but don't know anyone who's already using it.
    - james_pm 3y ago
      Emailed.
      - sdsd 3y ago
        Thank you! At first glance, Bluesky seems great. I like X and don't care about Musk or problematic speech, but Bluesky is showing me accounts I like, whereas it's hard to convince Twitter to show me content I want to see. Maybe it's just that Bluesky's current userbase is stronger, pre eternal September. Anyway, I really appreciated your generosity. I promise to be diligent about posting, so as to honor your invite. I will behave. Unlike on X, where I'll continue being completely insane lol.
Aissen 3y ago
Very interesting, IMHO one of Mastodon's biggest advantage is not the reverse-order timeline, but the ability to build your own timeline view, pick your own algorithms. There are already a few frontend-based solutions. This one is another, and quite interesting. I only wish the (vastly underfunded) Mastodon team would see this as an opportunity to provide server-computed timelines to prevent clients from fetching too much information just to get their own summary.
jp57 3y ago
I'd like to see a client with a set of features to enable manual feed curation. I think it's possible with maybe just two missing features: 1. Mark as read: the ability to mark posts, threads, or followed users as read. Your feed only shows unread stuff. Threads would become unread if they get new posts in them. 2. Prioritization of Following: You can sort your Following list in any order and unread messages and threads are presented in that order. I use essentially this method with my work Slack, which has a "sorted like your sidebar" option for the Unreads. I have a bunch of folders for different priority channels and individuals, with my immediate team, reports, and boss and the topics I work on at the top, various company wide stuff at the bottom, and a some of grades in between containing channels for my department and partners. As soon as I set it up this way it improved my Slack productivity and I started wishing I could sort Mastodon and Twitter this way.
PaulHoule 3y ago
I use k-means clustering to find topics using mpnet. I've done similar things with other kinds of document vectors and never had so much success. It is good for classification too and used in my YOShInOn smart RSS reader which I sometimes think of pointing at Mastodon.
leblancfg 3y ago
Good for you for reaching HN frontpage, Tim! This from a guy also on fosstodon =) Love the low-tech prototype. There exists a future where this kind of social media content curation is a viable and bootstrappable startup option. I'd like to live in that future.
londons_explore 3y ago
Head to GitLab, click 'New Repository', write a new mastodon client, post the link here.
data-ottawa 3y ago
Slightly off topic: I like that the SQLite database file is called “fossil”, because fossil is both relevant to mastodons and is the name of the source code management system for SQLite. That’s a fun intersection there.
eikenberry 3y ago
For federated systems like this why are there clients and servers... shouldn't they all be using a single system that stores all that user content locally and uses federation to communicate to others? I don't get why you'd want an account on someone else's server when you can be running your own.
- rainonmoon 3y ago
  Running your own server is laborious and adds risk. Some people want to take that on. Lots don't.
  - eikenberry 3y ago
    I'm not suggesting people run their own servers, I'm suggesting that the software shouldn't use the client/server split. That it would be better to run peer to peer using the federation protocol keeping the user 'account' local. At least that's the model I'm keeping an eye out for... IMO the federated server model is to close to the currently dominant centralized model to make the effort of moving to it worthwhile.
ganzuul 3y ago
> On a more philosophical note, I like the idea of social media algorithms but I hate the implementations. > What do you think? How could it be improved? Here is some interesting technology: https://github.com/microsoft/0xDeCA10B https://github.com/microsoft/0xDeCA10B - ML on the blockchain https://github.com/OpenMined/PySyft https://github.com/OpenMined/PySyft - Federated Learning Incentives are much harder but smart contracts can handle the tech part. Going this route you quickly have "quantum AI app store" and your system of government is a 12GB download. Can't even say if it's a good idea compared to e.g. anarcho-primitivism.

88 points by tkellogg 3y ago

I like the concept of "social media delivers a dumb feed, then my device groups and organizes them." In line with what is written in the conclusion, I would love to use a client like this that also does curation (by floating topics to the top once it starts seeing which topics you click on most) and then allowing interrogation/tuning of these recommendations. Why use openai instead of a local model though? (I'd imagine mistral-8x7-instruct would do well with the summarization task)

ekianjo 3y ago
mistal 7b base model is good enough for summarization. No need to go to the 8x7 one.
- tkellogg 3y ago
  OP here. Yeah, it’s also extremely low-risk. The sensitive part of the algorithm is the embeddings. This part is just making the group human readable. The reason I didn’t do mistral the first time is because I’m lazy. I gave myself 3-4 hours to get a first pass done, and getting a local model running seemed unnecessarily difficult. It would be a great addition though.
charcircuit 3y ago
Each device being sent the firehose does not scale. You need another service to at least do the candidate generation from the firehose to get a reasonable rate for your device to handle.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  I have a system that filters RSS feeds like this, out of 7000 articles it might pick 300 to show me, it takes just a few minutes to build and validate a model on a rather powerful PC so so far performance is not a problem. If I were wanting to offer this kind of service to other people I know I could get an economy of scale just ingesting RSS feeds once, I think a lot of users might be happier sampling items from the firehose instead of curating a feed list, and I'd probably give up on the pure content-based filtering and include some collaborative filtering because people would perceive that it learns faster.
- greggyb 3y ago
  That is exactly what is happening here. The Mastodon server is handling the firehose, and creating sub-streams for each user based on followed accounts and tags.
- ganzuul 3y ago
  Video streaming seems like a firehose. Do you mean the battery could not handle the LLM?
NewsyHacker 3y ago
Is unlimited user-end filtration and sorting seen as compatible with the spirit of Mastodon? Members of the Mastodon founding generation have sometimes expressed a wish for that founding generation to always remain visible and prominent, even as the user base expands. Part of it is that the founding generation is heavily trans, and they don’t want their identities and voices to be drowned out by wider cis society.
- mcv 3y ago
  Is the spirit of Mastodon that the site, rather than the user, decides what the user sees? That wouldn't make them much better than the commercial platforms. I absolutely want users to be in control of their feed, so I welcome projects like these. (I'm not actually on Mastodon but on Friendica, but I follow a lot of people on Mastodon.)

hernantz 3y ago

I crave for social media clients that allow users to customize their ranking algorithms for their feed.

cmiller1 3y ago
Without giving raw access to the database wouldn't this be a feature of the platform and not the client?
- sonicanatidae 3y ago
  The user could choose weights in specific categories, that the app could then take into account when building lists.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  depends entirely on how much the server API can provide in terms of granularity. Hence allowing the clients to do more than now.
Hamuko 3y ago
https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/7-27-2023-custom-feeds https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/7-27-2023-custom-feeds
dawnerd 3y ago
Nothing really stopping a mastodon client from hacking that together. Was thinking about this over the last couple weeks as well, even being able to specify a weight account you follow would be huge.
- lanstin 3y ago
  Just limiting high volume posters to some limited percentage of the feed would be cool.

velcrovan 3y ago

[flagged]

superkuh 3y ago

The mastodon client I really want is my web browser. I want my web browser to be able to go to a mastodon web server and see HTML of posts (and responses! so no, /embed is not a solution) with actual text. This traditional form of interface was removed in most mastodon implementations from version 3 and on for some reason. Requiring execution of complex code, either in the browser as javascript, or on your computer as a native client, is not cool. At least for twitter there's nitter but there's no easy way to read mastodon posts/threads.

zimpenfish 3y ago
I'm guessing you mean "without having to log in"? Otherwise I'd suggest Brutaldon might fit your needs. (and someone could very well tweak Brutaldon to work in a logged-out mode, I suppose)
- superkuh 3y ago
  Yes, without having to set up an account and log in. Like a normal webpage on a normal website.

timdiggerm 3y ago

All the AI generated illustrations used in this post appear to show a wooly mammoth and not a mastodon. Here is a nice comparison; the mastodon is on the right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon#/media/File:MammothVsMastodon.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon#/media/File:MammothVs...

mplewis 3y ago
This is too bad, because I felt the ai images really took away from the content of the post.
- tkellogg 3y ago
  OP here. Sorry you had that experience. I recently started doing it. Prior to the AI images, I got a lot of complaints about a “wall of text”, so I was looking for a way to break it up, but also not invested enough to spend much time on it. AI images gives me a sort of 2-for-1, in that I get decent visuals, as well as accurate alt text. idk, maybe i should back off a bit. Suggestions welcome.
  - ptx 3y ago
    The text seemed nicely broken up by the headings already, but maybe adding some syntax-colored code snippets (where relevant) would be another way to add some color to the visuals.
  - thaumaturgy 3y ago
    If I may be a bit of a curmudgeon for a moment: I've read some number of posts like this recently that had AI-generated art embedded to "break it up", and I've found that the effect is skim skim squint at AI image skim squint at AI image scroll to end Partly this is because a fun game with AI images is to identify the weird things they do. They have an interesting effect where they look sooooort of okay if you don't actually look at them. In your post for instance, the first image has a wild not-actually-a-pteranodon at left, second image has twins at bottom-right but also is that a caveman partying with antlers on his head in the background?, third image -- what contraption is that wooly mammoth pulling, actually? And, once the novelty of playing "Find Ten Things Wrong With This Picture" wears off, then the images are exactly equivalent to embedded stock photography from Shutterstock or whatever. Oh look, it's shiny happy people at computers in the middle of an otherwise interesting essay on the transformer architectures of large language models. (I enjoyed the rest of the content of your post. Amazing how effectively these tools are becoming productivity multipliers for the people experimenting with them.)

iteratethis 3y ago

Although it's early days, Bluesky has promising features regarding feed optimization. Users can build custom feeds and share them, you have control over sorting, etc. I like their moderation approach as well, at least its potential. You can indicate yourself how comfortable you are regarding various potentially harmful topics: hide/warn/show. I think this type of user control is exactly what social media needs. The power placed in the hands of users.

ixwt 3y ago
As you said, it's early days. That's all subject to change. Especially if it goes public.
TillE 3y ago
The most promising thing about Bluesky is that engagement seems surprisingly high. Posts from the larger accounts I follow get maybe 2000 likes on Twitter, 1000 on Bluesky, and 10 on Mastodon. I really hope they manage to federate themselves with the larger ecosystem in one way or another, it's annoying that they've chosen to not use ActivityPub.
- sdsd 3y ago
  If anyone has an invite, I really want to join but don't know anyone who's already using it.
  - james_pm 3y ago
    Emailed.
    - sdsd 3y ago
      Thank you! At first glance, Bluesky seems great. I like X and don't care about Musk or problematic speech, but Bluesky is showing me accounts I like, whereas it's hard to convince Twitter to show me content I want to see. Maybe it's just that Bluesky's current userbase is stronger, pre eternal September. Anyway, I really appreciated your generosity. I promise to be diligent about posting, so as to honor your invite. I will behave. Unlike on X, where I'll continue being completely insane lol.

Aissen 3y ago

Very interesting, IMHO one of Mastodon's biggest advantage is not the reverse-order timeline, but the ability to build your own timeline view, pick your own algorithms. There are already a few frontend-based solutions. This one is another, and quite interesting. I only wish the (vastly underfunded) Mastodon team would see this as an opportunity to provide server-computed timelines to prevent clients from fetching too much information just to get their own summary.

jp57 3y ago

I'd like to see a client with a set of features to enable manual feed curation. I think it's possible with maybe just two missing features: 1. Mark as read: the ability to mark posts, threads, or followed users as read. Your feed only shows unread stuff. Threads would become unread if they get new posts in them. 2. Prioritization of Following: You can sort your Following list in any order and unread messages and threads are presented in that order. I use essentially this method with my work Slack, which has a "sorted like your sidebar" option for the Unreads. I have a bunch of folders for different priority channels and individuals, with my immediate team, reports, and boss and the topics I work on at the top, various company wide stuff at the bottom, and a some of grades in between containing channels for my department and partners. As soon as I set it up this way it improved my Slack productivity and I started wishing I could sort Mastodon and Twitter this way.

PaulHoule 3y ago

I use k-means clustering to find topics using mpnet. I've done similar things with other kinds of document vectors and never had so much success. It is good for classification too and used in my YOShInOn smart RSS reader which I sometimes think of pointing at Mastodon.

leblancfg 3y ago

Good for you for reaching HN frontpage, Tim! This from a guy also on fosstodon =) Love the low-tech prototype. There exists a future where this kind of social media content curation is a viable and bootstrappable startup option. I'd like to live in that future.

londons_explore 3y ago

Head to GitLab, click 'New Repository', write a new mastodon client, post the link here.

data-ottawa 3y ago

Slightly off topic: I like that the SQLite database file is called “fossil”, because fossil is both relevant to mastodons and is the name of the source code management system for SQLite. That’s a fun intersection there.

eikenberry 3y ago

For federated systems like this why are there clients and servers... shouldn't they all be using a single system that stores all that user content locally and uses federation to communicate to others? I don't get why you'd want an account on someone else's server when you can be running your own.

rainonmoon 3y ago
Running your own server is laborious and adds risk. Some people want to take that on. Lots don't.
- eikenberry 3y ago
  I'm not suggesting people run their own servers, I'm suggesting that the software shouldn't use the client/server split. That it would be better to run peer to peer using the federation protocol keeping the user 'account' local. At least that's the model I'm keeping an eye out for... IMO the federated server model is to close to the currently dominant centralized model to make the effort of moving to it worthwhile.

ganzuul 3y ago

> On a more philosophical note, I like the idea of social media algorithms but I hate the implementations. > What do you think? How could it be improved? Here is some interesting technology: https://github.com/microsoft/0xDeCA10B https://github.com/microsoft/0xDeCA10B - ML on the blockchain https://github.com/OpenMined/PySyft https://github.com/OpenMined/PySyft - Federated Learning Incentives are much harder but smart contracts can handle the tech part. Going this route you quickly have "quantum AI app store" and your system of government is a 12GB download. Can't even say if it's a good idea compared to e.g. anarcho-primitivism.