state of the giant flist

[piranha]

i made several filters, all for the real people (as opposed to the communities and feeds) i read. the divisions are not arbitrary, but also not done by using an instrument such as "trust" or "closeness"; they're simply determined by how i know people -- through PLATO, soc.singles{.moderated}, alt.polyamory, LJ abuse, smut reading, rasfc/writing, or the ever so originally named catchall, "other". people who'd fit in several groups i moved into the smaller one.

it's working remarkably well, much better than i would ever have thought (i used to think this was a stupid way to filter which is why i never did it; this is a desperation measure). i can now quickly move through the day's posts in almost every list, and it fits in between doing other things. no longer do i fall behind and lose track because livejournal doesn't have a good sequencer but just throws more and more new posts at me.

except the alt.polyamory filter is too large. ideally it would be about half the size, then i could get through it while having breakfast or during similar breaks. as it stands i got hung up several times and felt more and more behind again.

i don't know how to split it. the only thing i can think of is "people with whom i actually interacted a lot on alt.poly" and others, but that might make two really uneven groups, not sure. can anyone think of a better way?

the "other" group also doesn't make me quite happy. there are some people in it whom i read religiously, and other people whose LJs i added because they're interesting, but i am not always in the mood for that kind of interesting. so i probably need to split that filter as well, and maybe add the people i read religiously into one of the tiny groups, like lj abuse or plato. oy, that hurts the classification person inside. :)

Comments

classifications

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Well, since the purpose of the classification seems to be to split your flist into groups of manageable size, ideally with the people in any given group being ones you'll be in the mood for at the same time, I don't see the problem.

Naming the groups would be more challenging.

[redbird]

Really arbitrary: either create a Farthing Party filter (if you haven't already) and pull some of the alt.poly people out into that (even though you met us before that event), or "alt.poly.1, alt.poly.2, alt.poly.3." Think of them as subspecies, or the second line of the book classification in the Library of Congress system/numbers after the decimal in Dewey.

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

i don't know how to split it.

alphabetically?

[elynne.livejournal.com]

That was gonna be my suggestion... when all else fails, fall back on the arbitrary rule-set of the alphabet. ;)

split alphabetically

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

you know, this is probably IT for the alt.poly people. *heh*. it doesn't require me to make any decisions about "quality of reading experience", it'd just split it into manageable chunks, and that's it. i'll try that.

thanks!

[liv]

This might feel too hierarchical, but I would probably make a must-read filter and move people there from alt.poly and other. If you move few enough to keep it small but many enough to leave alt.poly at a manageable size, would that achieve your aim without messing up your classification?

My experience is that filtering has been a godsend. I still read everybody on my friends list, but it's somehow much easier to have three different pages showing today's posts, than having to page back through three pages to see the same data in purely chronological order. That's not why I set up the filters, it's an unexpected side-benefit.

Wow, your flist really is giant! I'm overwhelmed by mine which is about half the size.

must-read vs not

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, that is hierarchical in a way that doesn't match how i think. there isn't anyone i "must" read. or perhaps, who that is changes not only on my mood, but is based on what i sometimes perceive as other people's needs. though i've fallen down on that so much the last couple years that it's probably no longer valid at all. i used to have a small filter into which i put people who had ongoing serious issues and where i was communicating a lot, but i've not used that in ages; i am mostly detached from any of that now because i don't have the energy.

the only thing for which that worked well was when i was on the abuse team. since i worked with the other members every day, and it was a fairly close-knit group, it was useful to have their LJs in its own filter that i'd read first thing, so i was always up on what was going on in their lives; who might be having a crappy day already and might need a little extra TLC in IRC, etc.

i am not in any group like that at this time.

which is why i have such a non-hierarchical setup now; it's the only thing i hadn't tried yet.

[ckd]

This reminds me that I still owe you the NetNewsWire writeup.

NetNewsWire

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

well, "owe". :) anyway, no hurry because i am completely swamped with everything else and am just not reading RSS feeds right now.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

I would probably make a "be sure not to miss this" filter or some such, and pile the very best journals from the larger / less interesting groups into it, assuming that the rest of the people in those groups are people you'd like to read significantly less often. (I would probably filter like this in the first place, if I were to make reading filters.) This doesn't actually seem to fit your preferred classification scheme well.

Maybe "current alt.poly posters" and "historical alt.poly posters". Or "alt.poly posters who post a lot" and "alt.poly posters who don't post a lot", adjusted so that the total number of daily posts in each group is approximately equal. Or by geography: Canadians, Americans, Europeans, etc.

be sure not to miss filter

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, that sort of filtering is something everybody else seems to do, and i tried and it never worked for me. i just don't think about people that way. there are only three categories for me:

- a tiny group of partners and very close friends (with whom LJ isn't a primary medium since we communicate in person, email, and IM already). these are the only ones where "be sure not to miss this" is always true, ironically. :)

- everyone else i know and have interacted with in various online venues (i consider them all in a continuum that's best labelled "friendlies", and people move around in there all the time as to how interested i am in what's happening; it's more driven by them than by me. this is impossible to classify.)

- people whose LJs i added because they're interesting to me, but we really have no personal connection (most of the writers on my list are in that group).

those categories don't make for suitably sized filters.

your other suggestions fit better with the current scheme, except i don't even know who falls into which category, *heh* -- i don't read/post myself anymore so i don't know who's current, ditto about posting a lot. the geography is too skewed in favour of americans.

but those are the kind of ideas i was hoping for! thanks for helping with the brainstorming!

Must read

[dr-brat.livejournal.com]

It sounds like you already have a functional division for other: must read and must be in the mood. What if you actually filter on that division?

Re: Must read

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, i think that might work, though "reading religiously" doesn't translate to "must read", but that doesn't really matter. i was too focussed on the fact that it always changes what sort of "interesting" i am in the mood for, but...

no, maybe not. what happens is that if i am not in the mood to read one person and not the next and not the next, then my eyes glaze over and i start to pay a lot less attention to the rest as well. so it does matter who is in that filter, but maybe filtering is simply not the answer here. maybe those LJs need to be bookmarked and i can make a special session set in opera where i load them all in at once and flip between to see whether anything happened with them lately that hits me in the right mood.

sorry... just thinking out loud. :) thanks for helping me brainstorm!

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that I have useful advice, other than that if you're just chunking for size, you could have multiple instances of some of them: alt.polyamory1 and alt.polyamory2, each with an arbitrary half of the original filter, or otherfrequent and otherinfrequent, split as indicated in the name. *shrug*

What I mostly wanted to say is that I originally read the subject line as, "state of the giant fist", which was sort of awesome. :)

[nolly.livejournal.com]

My reading filters are roughly by reading-priority, which is a combination of how much we interexct in other venues, how much I enjoy the person's writing, and inertia. (and probably some other factor(s) I'm not thinking of). When I friend a new person, they start in the middle, usually; if I find I'm skimming other posts looking for the next one from that person, they get moved up.

filter by reading priority

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, that's what it seems most people's filters are like. that does completely not work for me (already explained in other comments). :)