Filtering of news feed

[ckuethe]

Thanks for fixing the JSON problem.

Now that github loads again, my news feed is full of activity by people I don't know, or things I've said I don't want to see on the web view:

• dependabot adding labels to pull requests on other people's respositories (not my repo, I can't do anything about it.
• github-actions doing things
• people I don't know (I'm not following, they're not following me, we've never interacted) starring repositories, QwenLM/Qwen3-VL in particular. I haven't starred that, nor am I watching it.
• people I don't know commenting on repositories.

This makes it very hard to find activity by the people I am following, or repos I am watching. Is there a way to filter that out?

[maniac103]

May you be watching those repositories by any chance?

[ckuethe]

no. I just checked again and I'm not watching QwenLM/qwen-code (for example) or the other qwen repositories. And this activity doesn't show up on my feed in a browser.

[maniac103]

Well, the API we're using to populate the news feed is this one ... there doesn't seem to be any kind of control over the contents. Filtering client side doesn't seem to make much sense to me either, since the app can't know what events one is interested in.

[ckuethe]

*sadpanda* Sounds like a problem with the API then, since it's returning events that I don't want to see.

[achou11]

Yeah unfortunately looks like the only way to approach this is with client-side filtering. The additonal events returned by that API makes the news feed much less usable for me 🥲

Can imagine that there are at least a couple of these that would be worth filtering out by default. Maybe it's a matter of deciding on a couple of them and providing a setting to opt out of filtering in general 🤷‍♂️

https://docs.github.com/en/rest/using-the-rest-api/github-event-types?apiVersion=2022-11-28

Based on looking at the feeds of GitHub's web + mobile apps, it seems like they're also doing some sort of filtering of these events assuming the same API is being used (unable to verify source code, of course).

[achou11]

For me personally, the things I'd care about seeing in the news feed:

• people I follow: starring a repo, following an org, following other people, creating a repo (or making it public)
• anything that aligns with the "watch" settings I have for a repo

I think this amounts to only keeping a small portion of those event types. Guess GitHub has really made the events available quite granular 😅

[maniac103]

Based on looking at the feeds of GitHub's web + mobile apps, it seems like they're also doing some sort of filtering of these events assuming the same API is being used (unable to verify source code, of course).

They probably don't use the same API - they've done stuff in the web UI impossible to do via rest API since like forever. Latest example is the ability to provide the issue number when marking an issue an duplicate of another one.

I think this amounts to only keeping a small portion of those event types

Problem for the app is: it has no idea why the event appears in the feed. It can filter by event type, but not by event reason.