Show HN: Feedseer – A Mastodon instance to filter out posts based on content

If you have a preferred client or multiple clients across devices, this means that you don't need to worry about differences in features or preferences. It guarantees a consistent experience.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if an instance wants to comply with the recent EU laws about copyrights, GDRP, anti-hate speech, etc, filtering on the server is mandatory anyway.

As I understand it, "qualifiers" give the same filtering power to the user too.

I guess people could simply send encrypted tweets to the instance, and decrypt them on the client side to escape the filter.

Not my project, but why bother writing a whole client and maintaining it when all you want to do is build some better filters?

Get filtering happening on the server, then it works for everyone on that server regardless of whether they're using the default web app or an app on their phone.

Some Mastodon admins share their patches for things outside the scope of what gets approved by the project lead so if they decide it's a good thing then maybe they'll add this feature to their own instance; the 'source code' link at the bottom leads to the git repo that is presumably their live code.

This will be useful to consumers too since they can filter out angry posts from users they don't follow. I agree that, in practice, this might be more useful to moderators. Another use case is to automatically move posts to folders based on text/URLs in them.

Yes. Feedseer's qualifiers can do much more than regex filtering, like use AI to analyze the sentiment of a toot. The implementation details of a qualifier (regex, AI or other) are up to its creator and happen outside of Feedseer. Independently, a Feedseer user has the freedom to not use a qualifier (the default), or use it to take action (categorize/filter).

Gave you an upvote since you where downvoted, but I think we'll be better off if we are a bit more nuanced.

I too think it is bad when people refuse to listen to each other but there might still be reasons to filter at server level, I can think of 2 somewhat reasonable ones just now that doesn't have to do with censorship.

In essence we've been there for a while, since before Mastodon was even a thing in fact. Remember how, a few weeks ago, Wil Wheaton was hounded off Mastodon by folks accusing him of transphobia? That was because he promoted a trans woman's prominent, widely-advertised anti-GamerGate blocklist that - much like all such blocklists - included people she disagreed with, some of whom were trans, and a bunch of Hollywood folks apparently copied it. Twitter has an entire feature designed to enable this kind of blind mass-blocklisting.

> Outsourced, automatic, personal censorship?

You mean, like spam filtering in Gmail?

I'm not sure how this comment applies to the site discussed here?

It allows the user to set filters. There is no "influence by platform holders". There is no "AI". There is full control over the automation you use.

What if you want to follow someone except for 10% of posts that forward a webcomic you find distasteful?

What if you want to find 100 people who occasionally post content in a narrow area interesting for you, but you have no interest in the rest?

This is a benefit of moving away from centralizing platforms: rather than the platform forcing you into a particular "editorial" regime [where "no moderation/censorship at all" is an editorial regime just like any other], you can decide for yourself what editorial regime works best for you.

If you don't like it you can use another instance?

Maybe you don't see the benefit but I can see some people using this considering I know people heavily relying on pleroma filters.