This is a common support question that we get. It’s great that our platforms let users customize their feed to the extent that they can, but all this customizability can lead to confusion. Content can be hidden based on
- domain blocks
- instance, community, or user blocks
- language settings
- “seen” post settings
- bot post settings
- hidden post settings
Instead of reducing the customizability, I think we can fix this by fixing visibility. A little optional UI counter, enabled by default, could let users see if some content is being filtered out and narrow down which filter is causing it.
What are the technical challenges to something like this? I imagine it would need updates to the APIs to expose that information
Building on rimu’s point about not running the feed query twice: for the community page specifically there’s a cheaper signal already available. The community response carries a cached post count, so a UI could compare that against what the listing actually returns over a time window and show a hint like “some posts here are hidden by your filters” without a second heavy query.
For the main feeds, even a non-counting version would help a lot: when a feed comes back short or empty, show a small line listing which filter types are currently active (“you have 3 instance blocks, language filter on, hide-read on”) with a link to each setting. That’s just user settings the client already has, no new API, and it answers most of the “why can’t I see X” support questions.