Agree, but anyone competent could just sniff the traffic. (Or hopefully, lack thereof)

This. For all we know, the app could be doing all kinds of nefarious things and we wouldn't be able to tell.

Thanks a bunch! It took me a while to craft the solution to make sure it was both effective + private. I was originally inspired by Canopy. They built a news aggregator with private & personalized posts a few years back and the idea sat in my head.

To answer your question(s), there are quite a few signals that big tech uses to recommend content. Not all of them are privacy invasive (or at least they don't HAVE to be). My approach was to do thorough research on the different signals used by big tech to make their recommendation engines, and just build ones that 1.) were possible given fediverse API limitations and 2.) private. I had to craft some novel approaches to make it work but I'm pretty happy with the outcome!

One of the biggest differences between the "big tech" approach and Quiblr's is that most big tech does not keep data simply on your device. They store it in datacenters to build large social-webs to essentially cluster users (and push more relevant ads).

But I was able utilize many of the other signals used by big tech (e.g. communities you engage with, metadata of content you read, dwell time, post/comment/vote activity) and I designed it to work offline with no servers.

Edit: grammar

Yep I will be happy to see that too

Lots of great feedback. I'll try to address each:

• I tried to differentiate voting vs. "like/dislike" for the algorithm as to not confuse users who think they are logged in. I can put more thought into how to make this a bit more intuitive
• Quiblr is built as a progress web app (PWA) so it uses native app components. The benefit is that it is faster and easier to manage multiple code bases. But the con is that it doesn't have all the same benefits as HTML. I added an "open posts in new tab" feature in the settings
• I like the idea of added more body text in the post itself. My fear was that it would make the feed look too crowded, but I can take second look at it
• I love the tooltips idea
• The 3 dot ellipses has a Post Detail section for each post. Maybe this could be a good place to add the link back to the original Instance url.
• I like the scrollbar idea. I think this could make sense as an optional setting because I personally don't prefer the scroll bar but I want to include it for users who do prefer it
• I added a refresh button for users using the PWA version (since they don't have a refresh button in the browser). Maybe something like "pull down to refresh" could work on
• You should be able to press the "<" back button when viewing a community on mobile or just back in your browser. Both should take you back to your feed. Let me know if it isn't working as intended
• I'll have to see the API allows for removing downvoted items from feeds. I can try to get creative if needed

Edit: Added tooltips for post buttons + original url on the Post Detail page. I will continue to update this comment as I work through other additions in this list

I'll second all of these, especially the lack of scrollbar and "expand text post in feed" button, and the hidden like/dislike buttons. The like/dislike vs upvote/downvote thing is tricky; I don't have a good solution for it, but maybe different icons that don't read as up/down would work.

Also, from a quick poke at things:

• There doesn't seem to be a way to switch the "For You" feed away from card view. I think it's fine if you want to make it a separate view setting from the main page, but I'd like to be able to change it to my view of choice.
• I'd like to see the post/comment body text tweaked for better readability: higher contrast against the background, a touch more space between lines, and a lighter weight (regular or medium) would all make reading long posts more pleasant, imo.
• In compact view, if I expand the attached image, there doesn't seem to be a way to shrink it back down, as clicking again opens the post.
• When viewing a post, there's a community sidebar on the right with all the rules and such, but that info is missing from the actual community detail page.
• The community sidebar on the post page scrolls separately from the rest of the post, which is weird to me on desktop. Giving it an "expand" button might be a good compromise, so you don't have the weird case of short post/long sidebar unless the user explicitly asks for it.
• Navigating front page > post page > community detail page, and then hitting back on the browser twice returns me to what the nav bar tells me is the front page, but only that one community's posts are shown. Refreshing or clicking "front page" fixes this, but it's a little confusing the first time.
• Navigating front page > community detail page doesn't trigger a... page load, I guess? My browser (firefox) doesn't recognize the community detail page as a separate page, so I can't hit back to go back to the main feed. Instead, I have to either refresh or click "front page".

Overall, though, this is super impressive!

Notes! I’ll aim to add it to the next release. Thanks

Not open source (at least yet). Quiblr has been a side project for me and I've never managed an open source project before lol I'm talking with a buddy on how that could work though because he manages a few open source projects

Also, I added an about page in Settings >> For You >> Learn More

I used lemmy.world as the default for non-technical users or for folks who can’t decide. Users can still select different instances. Maybe it could make sense to default sign ups to a list of popular instances

I just gave Quiblr an open source update. You can find GitHub can be found here

Web based for now. IOS and Android apps are in the works!

Your comment made me smile! I've worked hard to make Quiblr a platform for the fediverse to be clean, modern, and accessible. Basically - remove all the friction that generally comes with fediverse apps

Thank you so much! And I just made a note on the voting arrow order. I like the idea of making that an option in settings

And I can look into collapsing parent comments too. As you pointed out, I made it so just child comments collapse. The idea to collapse the parent comment never occurred to me lol

I'll see if I can work both of these features into the next release.

Just a quick follow up here - I added a simple toggle setting to Quiblr that lets you flip the arrow order.

Apologies for the slow roll out, I had a big laundry list of updates in this latest release!

opwn source

I'm stealing this term.

THANK YOU! Im glad you love the UX and recommendations feature.

Can you elaborate what you mean on the back button? Pressing back on your browser scrolls to the top of your feed?

It does not. I haven't used matrix yet. What are matrix rooms used for?

The recommendation engine doesn’t require users to log in. You would still need to log in to vote, post, comment, etc