15
[Proposal] Content Filtering (lemmy.zip)
submitted 4 days ago by moseschrute@lemmy.zip to c/blorp@lemmy.zip
14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm working on a new filtering engine that I think will be like nothing you've seen yet.

Basic overview:

  • There will be a list of filters you can browse
    • E.g. US Politics
  • You select the filter list(s) you are interested in
  • The filter list will receive updates.
    • Say a new political event happens and a new name floods the news. The list can be updated dynamically to include the new name without you having to do anything.

For those of you that are tech savvy:

  • Filter lists will live on GitHub
  • You can fork an existing filter list.
  • You can create/host your own filter list for other Blorp users.
  • You can open pull requests for existing filter lists.
  • There will be some tools within Blorp to debug your filter list

Other notes:

  • I don't plan on letting you build these filter list from within the app. They are far too complex to edit easily within the app.
  • But that complexity means you can do far more than other apps
    • Block a post IF it mentions a US state (e.g. "Texas") AND it mentions "shooting"
    • Block a post IF it mentions "ICE" AND it mentions ("detention" OR "deport")
    • Block a post IF it's by a specific list of users AND it mentions a specific word
  • The goal is to create more collaboration between users and make it easier to cut through all the noise on Lemmy and PieFed

How are you currently using filtering in Blorp, Voyager, etc?

  • What type of content are you currently trying to block?
  • Are your filters very unique to you, or something that could be shared as a list?
all 15 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] Chrysanthemum@piefed.social 6 points 3 days ago

Currently, I’ve used Blorp to block communities and tag/block users; it’s faster and fool-proof (for me). If I don’t want anything from any News Community to reach my feed, I just block it.

Now that articles aren’t as frequently cross-posted, I’ve been slowly unblocking communities and users. Most of the users I’ve blocked were already banned so my Block List isn’t unique after all. I appreciate being able to manage my Block List from the Blorp app; thank you very much.

This Content Filtering you are proposing sounds amazing! It looks like I’ll be able to have my feed set back to All or Subscribed again instead of having to go through each individual community.

[-] moseschrute@lemmy.zip 7 points 3 days ago

What you described at the end is exactly what I want to fix. You should be able to browse all. I’ll make it so the filters are easy to toggle on/off if you wanna peek what was is being hidden. Potentially I may add a scheduling feature if you want to subject your self to a limited amount of political doom every day. But for v1 of filters I don’t want to over complicate it.

[-] RmDebArc_5@piefed.zip 6 points 4 days ago

I mainly block communities (not keywords) that are just automated Reddit archives. Depending on the bot used this could be done via the text in the post (if it mentions being a automated post), however I think community blocking works better for this so not a feature useful for me at the moment. I do however have a question regarding the way this would, would it be like an adblocker where it’s just a text file? If so, do you have to host it on GitHub or eg codeberg work as well?

[-] moseschrute@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 days ago

Just wanted to loop back to this. If you don’t mind listing out the automated post filters you are taking about, I would love to create a filter list for those that can share with everyone.

[-] RmDebArc_5@piefed.zip 2 points 2 days ago

Also what would also be cool is one for AI generated content eg communities like !imageai@sh.itjust.works or !aiart@hilariouschaos.com

[-] RmDebArc_5@piefed.zip 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I just block the lemmit.online and zerobytes.monster instances and the lululemmy.com/c/redditmirror and 50501.chat/c/Mirror communities. There are probably more but those appeared in my feed so I blocked them. It isn't enough to block the specific bot accounts as the communities will still appear in the community list. Since the instances are as far as I can see just reddit archives I just blocked the whole instance.

The lemmit bot includes

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on

in every post and the zerobytes one

The original post:

in every post. There seems to be no consistent message with these bots, so I'm not surre text filtering would be more effective than instance/community/user based blocking

[-] moseschrute@lemmy.zip 7 points 4 days ago
  1. The filter spec I mention would allow you to crate a list that blocks all automated content. Either by post body like you mentioned or by blocking specific communities. The difference is instead of every person individually maintaining that list, everyone could share the list of filters.
  2. The filters will just be a json file. You will be able to host filters as long as the service you are using supports some sort of hosting. GitHub has GitHub pages. I would have to look into what codeberg offers
[-] RmDebArc_5@piefed.zip 2 points 4 days ago

Codeberg has codeberg pages but the feature is in maintenance mode. I was just curious if there was any vendor lock in

[-] moseschrute@lemmy.zip 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I’m not too worried vendor lockin. I’m not using anything that specific to GitHub. I’ll probably put the filters behind filters.blorpblorp.xyz so I can always point that domain to a different location later if I need to move off GitHub.

Edit: I think I can get around codeberg pages not being high availability by cached the filters. Then when we are able to pull the most up to date version, it will update the cache. I was going to do this anyway in case you subscribe to a filter and it gets deleted. If it gets deleted, the filter list will still be cached.

[-] SrMono@feddit.org 6 points 4 days ago

Wow. That sounds elaborate and well thought out.

I actually only used simple filters in mastodon to filter my timeline and up too now never thought about filters in lemmy.

Would you filter post by headline or bodytext? A filter in the body might result in a lot false positives.

[-] moseschrute@lemmy.zip 8 points 4 days ago

The filtering engine I’m prototyping supports filtering by title or body. I’m test driving a filter list to hide all US political content. I’m going to see how successful that is and then decide if body is necessary. So far, I’ve been able to accomplish everything I need without looking at the post body.

[-] Blaze@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 days ago

Nice idea, personally I think that updatable block list should be managed at the platform level (Lemmy/Piefed/Mbin) rather than the client, but that's a personal opinion

[-] moseschrute@lemmy.zip 9 points 4 days ago

I would like to publish this as a specification for other clients to implement. So I’m thinking this could live outside of Blorp, Lemmy, and PieFed.

[-] Blaze@lemmy.zip 2 points 4 days ago

This could also work !

this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
15 points (100.0% liked)

Blorp

163 readers
1 users here now

Bl🪐rp – a Threadiverse client for Lemmy and PieFed.

Prefix Posts

Try it!

🚀 Download

Support Blorp

Self Host

founded 1 month ago
MODERATORS
moseschrute@lemmy.zip