Today as I was searching for interesting communities to join I suddenly became saddened as I remembered this app that I spent hours using. StumbleUpon. When it was young it was the app I spent the most time on waiting between classes. just finding something interesting was always worth it.

The app is not what it used to be. I went to stumbleupon.com just to see and its all corporate. I’m sad because I kinda want StumbleUpon for the fediverse. Maybe I don’t want to search for hours looking for communities to join, mastodon users to follow, or pixelfed instances that may have great photos. Maybe I want StumbleUpon for the Fediverse. I could connect it with any federated account, stumble upon something interesting, and subscribe. How could we go about building that?

What are your thoughts?

  • imaqtpieMAEnglish
    241·
    1 year ago

    Stumbleupon was great because the internet was great. Not so much anymore.

    But something like that for the fediverse could be cool. Unfortunately there are a lot of more pressing features that need to be added, so that one might take a while.

    • catdaemonEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      People tend to post things to talk about here, and there’s not so much “interesting” stuff and more memes/news. The thing about Stumbleupon was that it was curated in a very particular way. I don’t think the internet is anything less than it was, it’s just harder to find the good stuff.

      • imaqtpieMAEnglish
        61·
        1 year ago

        That’s fair. But it’s also becoming so hard to find the good stuff that I think you have to acknowledge that the internet as a whole is lesser. Even if everything from 15 years ago were still on the internet (and it’s certainly not), the addition of a mountain of shit has still caused the average quality of content to drop precipitously.

  • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
    14·
    1 year ago

    I’m intrigued and in a position to build something like this.

    Let’s talk details. So there’s ~2k Lemmy servers right now, probably like the top 100 are worth looking at. I can connect to any server and list communities and non-nsfw posts (regardless of if you have an account there). I can use their search box or use any of their sorting methods, and I could exclude anything from communities you’re a part of, but I can’t just pull something out randomly

    So I could go to a server, grab the top local post for the day that links somewhere, I could pick a random community by hot or active, I could look for a library that will give me keywords to search and give you a list of sorted results across many servers

    I guess I could also find how many communities they have, pick a random number, and check if that one has more than 5 users (if not, reroll)

    Thoughts or suggestions?

  • mecha_skecha77English
    10·
    1 year ago

    Its not exactly for the Fediverse but you can try Cloudhiker. Has a similar function and you can choose the types of sites you want it to show.

  • LemmeIn42English
    8·
    1 year ago

    I still have a loooooong bookmark folder of gems from StumbleUpon

  • BadApe@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    I am new to fediverse / lemmy as well. The traverse menu in the Memmy app at least lists out other communities to explore. Not quite stumble upon, but still useful.

    I’m just waiting for more people to leave Reddit I think. Sort of surprised that more expel haven’t.

    • EezyvilleOPEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      The Reddit communities are opening back up and the mods are getting replaced. I don’t think there will be many more Reddit refugees coming unless the company does something stupid again.

      • canEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        Like withhold the official app icon behind premium?

    • flipthetube@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      I’ve been surprised that so many people are completely fine with Reddit shitting on their faces, but then I remember how mainstream it got over the years and it makes sense.

      • imaqtpieMAEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        Yeah many of the newer redditors are predisposed to eating shit, and many of the medium term redditors haven’t yet realized how full of shit reddit actually is.

        It’s sh.it all the way down.

      • catdaemonEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        Remember, most people there are passively consuming content and don’t care. It’s when the content dries up or becomes boring they will leave. The problem then will be that they go to Instagram, TikTok or Twitter instead of Lemmy.

  • PrincessLeiasCatEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    I’m not a big sports fan but the majority of my friends are. That app got me through hours and hours of sportsball. I adored it and I still think about it.