No matter which sort you use (except for new), content is recommended to you by activity. Depending on the sort (active, hot, top) it uses a slightly different mixture of votes/comments/time since post to determine the order.
The only exception is scaled, which boosts a little bit midsized communities, but still doesn’t manage to improve visibility of niche ones.
If lemmy is to truly start having active hobbyist communities instead of being 95% lefty US politics, Shitposts, and some tech stuff, it needs a sort that takes into account the user’s engagement.
For example, if I upvote / comment often in a community, there should be an option to have posts from the community be boosted in my feed, even if it’s a tiny community.
Let’s say I’m subscribed to !world@lemmy.world and !news@lemmy.world because I want to occasionally see news. However, I’m also subscribed to a couple hundred other communities, some of them who don’t manage to get more than a couple upvotes on their biggest posts. And whenever I see them I’m replying/upvoting because I’m passionate about that topic.
My feed shouldn’t be 95% c/news and c/world because those are the most upvoted and commented. I shouldn’t have to scroll down hundreds of posts to find “big” posts in small communities I interact with at any opportunity I get.
That’s why I think it would be beneficial to lemmy if the sort/algorithm took into account your engagement in a way.
It doesn’t have to be complicated, you can have a single number “engagement score” for every community calculated with a basic formula, and that number is used as a boost to the community.
I’m aware that there are some examples of successful niche communities on lemmy. But that’s mainly because either a significant chunk of the lemmy userbase is into that niche (let’s face it the lemmy community is not a representative sample of the world population, we tend to be very similar people), or because the posts on it are simplified image/video type posts which appeal to people who don’t know much about the subject.
Isn’t that the difference between “active” and “hot?”
One is just upvotes; the other is votes and comments.
I don’t think it would help, to be honest. A dead community not being posted to still won’t show up on your feed if you sort by engagement.
read my post, not just the title.
Hi, I created the Lemmy client Quiblr which includes a For You feed which constantly evolves with the types of posts you interact with. 100% private and on-device (i.e. no data leaves your device).
On quiblr, you can use the “For You” sort like any other sort option
Nice. I will try it. Do I have to keep Quiblr cookies for the option to work?
This sounds like the sort of thing that’s best solved with a ‘favourite’ option that pushes posts from favourited communities to the top of the feed. No need to get in there and over-complicate it with bespoke weightings or anything.
No matter which sort you use (except for new),
Yes, sorting by new is best. The rest of the post seems irrelevant.
I wish the web ui (and apps) could work like an old fashioned usenet reader, where it would list your subscribed communities and say how many unread posts each one had. I don’t like having all the communities jumbled together. That seems fixable.
Same, I stay away from /all and only follow my subscribed communities by new.
The biggest problem with lemmy for me is the multiple “duplicate” communities.
There should be a feature to combine them at the client level. So the 3 different “privacy” communities could just be viewed as one on my lemmy client
Although there were some proposed solutions for this issue, when scaled sort was implemented, @nutomic@lemmy.ml closed all related issues, even when they weren’t being solved by scaled sort. So, it’s clear that since there are no longer any open issues about this, no one is going to care about solving it. Therefore, it seems like the only option is to accept this fact and learn to cope with it. At this point, I’ve come to terms with the fact that Lemmy is mainly a platform for shitposts, while Reddit is for everything else. When I look at the feed, I mostly see memes, US politics, and some tech.
Custom feeds may not be the most efficient solution due to scalability concerns. However, an alternative approach could be to make the metadata about the posts (votes, comments, etc) available through an API call. This would enable users to develop their own algorithms for content discovery and potentially create a more personalized experience. Users could then implement, share and install these algorithms using tools like Tampermonkey or other userscript managers.
When I look at the feed, I mostly see memes, US politics, and some tech.
My solution to this (same experience here), was to block all the communities that were flooding with this stuff and anything else I didn’t care for, and then just browse All. Now my home feed is pretty nice.
Leftist into tech.
My feed got very overwhelmed by depressing relatable memes that, guess what, had leftist views expressed in the comments, and posts that were not politics but ended up getting into there anyways.
I might be leftist but damn if outrage and despair isn’t exhausting, I come to social media for fun, not to be angry and sad and hopeless.
Gave up on All incredibly quickly, only use Subscribed (I explicitly excluded anything political from Subscribed). So much less outrage and despair, so many more cute animals.
You can still use All, if you block the communities that you don’t want to see, one by one. It’s exhausting and new ones continue to be added, but otherwise it’s hard to know about new communities that come along that you might like.
So like I blocked !memes@lemmy.ml bc of its constant (seemingly not-entirely-joking) call for guillotining irl people including average people who simply were born in a capitalist nation, but subscribed to !tech_memes@lemmy.world that I enjoy much more now - the latter created only a few days ago, check it out!:-)
Also !fedimemes@feddit.uk. Really you miss so much only browsing by Subscribed. But do what works for you, bc I get it: the amount of extremist content on Lemmy is extremely high, and as you say depressing in its consistency.
You can still use All, if you block the communities that you don’t want to see, one by one. It’s exhausting and new ones continue to be added, but otherwise it’s hard to know about new communities that come along that you might like.
Yes, this was pretty much the same way I thought about it since I want know about new, interesting communities and hope that eventually the smaller ones will thrive like they did on Reddit. Honestly, I didn’t even think it was that exhausting. I would browse the home feed and as soon as I saw a stupid post that seemed to be typical of a particular community, I would click directly on the community link from the home feed and then click block this community. The nice thing about doing it this way is that you tend to quickly get rid of the worst offending communities which has the most significant impact on your timeline. After that, it was more of an occasional block for me.
Yup, same. Though you’ll still miss the extremely niche ones that way - e.g. I had an account on discuss.online and noticed the community !drpg@discuss.online mentioned in the sidebar featured area. To this day my post offered there remains the single one - even the creator didn’t bother making one, probably just squatting the name.
And I noticed !tech_memes@lemmy.world by the creator making a post announcing having created it.
I think browsing by All is helpful but by the time you find good communities there they have already taken off enough to be noticed.
Which is why I really enjoyed browsing by New often - you get the bleeding edge stuff that perhaps few people will ever see or upvote:-). But you also get a LOT of e.g. anime posts that way too, as new communities for them kept popping up.:-P
Good tip about browsing by New. I don’t do that very often, and I don’t think I have since I blocked a bunch of communities. I’ll try it again, thanks!
I realize my wording “Gave up on All” probably came off as if I wanted to use it and was disappointed I couldn’t, so I appreciate you trying to give me advice on how I could still use it. I’m happy doing things this way though. I find Subscribed far easier to use than playing whack-a-mole with the many, many meme communities that inevitably have a “haha the world SUCKS” post, and then understandable but still-not-good-for-me-personally vents about the world sucking in the comments. Or news communities (not just politics!) that inevitably post something that could tie into politics, and then all the politics in the comments. You said it’s exhausting yourself, and I simply don’t have the energy to put quite that much effort into it. If you find it worth it anyways, more power to you, but I really don’t mind missing out on something I might like in exchange for missing out on 1) stuff I really don’t like and 2) a lot of stuff I’m ambivalent about and would rather just scroll past.
I do look at !newcommunities@lemmy.world, which is good enough for me in my opinion re: discovering new stuff, and although this isn’t really the purpose of !fedigrow@lemm.ee, it often tells me about communities I didn’t know about. And sometimes I click Communities on an instance and wander through the list.
I’m happy doing things this way though.
Ah, this is indeed the main thing:-).
Fwiw, it also helps to block people. I mean, that sounds obvious, but in a couple cases I started to notice how I may not need to block an entire community since I could get the same effect by blocking the user - plus also not see their posts in other communities as well. Or maybe I’m deluding myself and perhaps I later went on to block the entire community. Some really do just have so many trash articles that it’s not worth getting upset about each one individually so much as simply moving onwards to better ones:-).
I agree that fediverse needs a personalized “explore” page in general. For example, this is the only plus feature of Bluesky over Mastodon (in terms of technology). It is obvious how big difference it makes.
I generally avoid the evil algorithms found on other social networks, but I hope we see that in Lemmy.
Good algorithm should:
- be open-source for users
- be togglable
- boost engagement boost on positive emotions
- be personalized
- promote niche communities
- promote balanced political debate (probably the hardest)
Blackbox echo chamber generators really should be avoided. They add to the angst and anger of the Internet, and of society.
Community search could be improved. And people should learn to actually use it, rather than being spoon fed whatever some programmer they’ve never met thinks they should eat based on the last 3 things they clicked on.
Community search could be improved.
This isn’t a community search problem. I absolutely should NOT have to intentionally visit every single niche community that I am already subscribed too.
The USER needs a way to control their feed, either by throttling large communities or boosting smaller ones.
