Yeah I'm pretty interested in this and Topics is only the first iteration of the idea. At the time piefed.social was basically a single-user instance so making the topics admin-manually-curated groupings was fine. Perhaps it's time to take things to the next level, tho.
The concept of 'multireddits' sounds like a bundle of related functionality and I'm not sure which parts of that you're interested in that PieFed's "topics" doesn't already do. Is it the user-created part? The subscribing part? The join-many-communties-at-once part? PieFed does some of those already but you won't see it unless you're logged in...
wiki_me@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Yeah basically those parts, i guess , for example if i want a multireddit i want “news” without the politics and certain communities (e.g. business and “the police problem” i don’t want), i guess that’s a typical use case for average Joe, he wants news but not too much news. i think there is research showing too much news is bad for mental health and social media might cause radicalization (see a scientific systematic review of the subject)
rimu@piefed.social 4 months ago
Yeah user-created topics would be a fine enhancement. Various aspects of the multireddit concept have separate issues in the issue queue but they haven't been coherently tied together yet. It might be time to do that.
One way to limit exposure to negative news is a keyword filter, which I implemented 6 months ago, early on in the project: https://piefed.social/post/7576
wiki_me@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
avoidance is generally considered harmful for mental health, what would be better is giving users the ability to curate their information diet, news sources should be trustworthy , display rational reasoning which might help users learn by observation (aka observational learning) , this will be helpful for mental health and mental fitness because rational thinking is associated with mental health.
multireddits could help with that because instead of getting just news about ukraine/israel/sudan/iran from a general community, you could get it from communities specific to those conflicts , the people subscribing to these communities are probably more motivated to discuss it so they will generate more rational thinking (which is more effortful so it requires more motivation).