I’ve noticed that there are a few communities that tend to dominate when viewing all. Some days it gets to where looking at all isn’t very different than just looking at Memes@lemmy.ml or 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone.
Before someone says “you can just block communities you don’t want to see,” it’s not that I never want to see them, it’s that I want to be able to have a view that shows me what is new and popular in a wide variety of communities. I appreciate seeing a few good memes in my feed. The problem is when that’s all I see. Changing the sort from active to hot or top x days doesn’t have much effect on which communities dominate, so that isn’t the solution either.
“You can just subscribe to communities you like”. True, but that has the effect of narrowing what I see. I’d like a view that showed me new things I never thought to subscribe to.
Lemmy devs - if you are reading this - it would be nice to have a feed that limited the number of posts showing up from any particular community. It could be a simple cutoff of 2 or 3 posts, or maybe some sort of weighting function to cause additional posts from the same community to appear lower in the sort order for that feed.
I’d love to hear what devs and other users think about this.
Edit: To everyone saying “just sort be new” - yes, that has its uses, but it only solves part of the problem. I’d like a feed that shows me what is new and popular, but from more than just one or two communities.
I read something the other day that they’re working on a new sorting algorithm that would limit it to the top few posts from each community within a given time frame. Specifically to address this issue.
No idea on timeframe or further details, or if I even summarized it correctly lol.
I really hope they consider doing a multi subscription sort as well. I miss being able to go to just the news or just funny, etc.
Yes, they are working on a so called “best” sorting: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3378
And yes, they are working on “multi”: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
Sweeeeet, pretty close to perfect then. Thanks.
Idk it seems like a problem that will sort itself out as Lemmy grows, and artificially limiting how many posts from a community can reach the front page seems like a suboptimal solution that’s going to have unintended consequences down the line.
I’d agree if the coms in question were niche but so far in my experience they never are. When it comes to communities dominating All, it’s always bottom-of-the-barrel memes and porn. The posts from non-garbage communities that show up are usually by themselves
Everyone’s definition of bottom of the barrel will be different, and nobody’s personal content preferences should be forced on the community as a whole. If you really dislike those communities that much you can block them.
I do, my blocklist is quite large already
The point I’m making is that the communities that would be most affected (negatively) by it are the giant low effort meme/shitpost ones that don’t “need” the exposure to thrive because they’re general interest communities
Right now those communities are more important than ever. They are what’s going to bring more people here and grow the fediverse. I don’t want to start hiding popular content at a time when Lemmy most needs to be popular.
Is the goal of Lemmy to follow the reddit playbook where quantity is more important than quality? I much prefer thoughtful, specific content to “mass appeal” content. There’s no shortage of places to find the latter, why does it need to be the focus here?
The goal is likely going to be different based on what community you’re in.
Because this is donation-funded. Having a big audience is the only thing that can ensure financial stability long term.?
And I don’t think content that is funny rather than informative is inherently bad or less important. There’s nothing wrong with this place being fun and not just some stuffy content classroom.
The real issue I see is that it’s all reposted reddit content so Lemmy looks like a crappy clone instead of being its own thing. For those who enjoy those posts, why would they switch to a site that has the same posts but with empty comments sections?
I’m not saying it’s some huge problem or anything. I just don’t think limiting the amount of frontpage posts per community will negatively affect the site
Doesn’t Reddit totally weight by size of community tho? Not saying we should just ape the old site but I suspect it’s actually necessary for smaller communities to grow naturally.
I think there are better ways to highlight smaller communities and grow them more organically, like a community dedicated to new and small communities (sorry if I fucked up that link, I’m new here) could highlight a new community each day worthy of our attention. Reddit used to have a subreddit of the day.
Right now the number one thing federated social media needs is just more users. I worry they’ll feel discouraged if they stop seeing the content that gets the most upvotes right now.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !newcommunities@lemmy.world
I think I’m going to have to disagree with you on that. New communities is fine but as someone who’s been active over there for a while it definitely seems that the issue is that it’s impossible for small communities to get any traction on the main page. I think the most important thing for long term growth is making sure that new users don’t come over here and find that all the communities they are interested in are dead.
I like to use “Hot” instead of active as it seems to fetch posts from a more diverse set of communities
I’ve also heard that view by new comments is solid as well
This you? https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/comment/1180416 it’s a direct copy/paste of that comment plus one sentence
I’m really confused lol, that is not me I have this account and one on beehaw.
How strange I had a different comment but I edited it and it changed to that one …
Btw, It’s already possible to block all bot posts
Ohhh is that what unchecking the “show bot account” does I thought it removed the badge indicating a user was a bot account. Thanks!
Top from the past 6 or 12 hours works better than Hot IMO. It feels more like the traditional reddit front page.
This has already been mentioned a few times. Just find the relevant issue on GitHub and give it an upvote.
There’s also a pull request https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3378
Lgtm!
There’s also a comment by Nutomic (a main dev) which shows they are aware of threads like this:
There are a lot of user complaints that posts from the same few large communities are always at the top.
What if you make an alt account that blocks big prominent communities when sorting through /all so you can view the top posts from smaller communities?
But then you have to change accounts, which I understand isn’t difficult, though it’s still something that needs to be done proactively by the user. Would be nice to just have a better content ranking algorithm that gives smaller communities a chance.
I generally use “New Comments” as my sorting and it’s a little bit better, but still the same spammy communities end up on top
Memes, memes as far at the eye can see
So many memes
I don’t hate it yet, since they’re the memes of my childhood/teen years, so tbh I find them funnier than the post 2016/18 bullshit
Note that this is one of the advantages of having an account on a smaller and/or more focused instance or having multiple accounts.
All “Alls” are not the same. Actually, the “All” displayed on a given instance is everything local to that instance and everything from other instances to which someone on that instance has subscribed. So if nobody from that instance has subscribed to a particular community on another instance, then for all intents and purposes, it just doesn’t exist. Even on “All”.
Granted that it’s somewhat unlikely for an instance to not have someone somewhere along the way subscribe to some notably popular community, it is possible, and the smaller and more focused the instance is, the more likely it is.
Thanks for teaching me. I can see that causing challenges down the road.
For example, I’m always on the lookout for all things quilting. If someone names their quilting community “Fabric Hordes” (not impossible, just look at phenomenon like r/animetitties) it wouldn’t come up in my explicit searches, and is very unlikely to be sought out or found by others in my instance.
Right, but there are lots of ways around that.
There’s already been a fair amount of demand for some method to group communities by interest, so it’s essentially guaranteed that somebody is going to provide some way to do that, and likely multiple somebodies are going to figure out multiple ways.
So, would it be wise and helpful for a mod or bot per instance to subscribe to as many communities as possible to help the instance’s feed?
Hell no.
How does that “help” their feed? What possible benefit could there be in using a bot to subscribe willy-nilly to every community out there, no matter how shitty it is?
I mean - if some instance owner wants to do that, that’s their choice, and I guess there are people out there who would like the resulting instance filled to the brim with every bit of garbage that exists anywhere in the fediverse, so it’s safe to assume that somebody will do it sooner or later. Personally, I think the idea is repulsive though.
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough in that other post - I think that the fact that each instance has a different “All” depending on what the members there have subscribed to is a good thing. It means that different instances have different feels, and over time, as they get more established, that’s going to be even more the case.
So for instance, a notably tech-oriented instance is going to end up displaying pretty much every tech-oriented community on the fediverse on its All because somebody on the instance will have subscribed to it, pretty much no matter what it is, AND at the same time, all of the stuff nobody’s interested in just won’t be there at all, because nobody bothered to subscribe to it in the first place.
Granted that that’s not going to appeal to people who want to be flooded with every bit of garbage on the entire fediverse when they click All, but they can just go away and sign up with some other instance that gives them what they want. Which I’m sure is exactly what the people who sought out a tech-oriented instance in the first place would prefer anyway.
How does that “help” their feed? What possible benefit could there be in using a bot to subscribe willy-nilly to every community out there, no matter how shitty it is?
I don’t know… You made it sound like the only way for me to have more communities show up in my All feed on lemmy.ca would be if a volunteer on lemmy.ca, be it a bot or mod, subscribed to all the communities they could find. Hense seeing top posts from All communities. And I only meant for a bot or mod to just subscribe. Not to repost everything.
If that isn’t how it works, sorry. It is why I asked if that would work or not.
You don’t need a mod or a bot to do it for you. You can go find communities on other instances and subscribe to them, and that all by itself gets them added to the All feed on your home instance.
Or you could just register an account on a different instance that slready has more stuff on it, like lemmy.world.
Ah. I had noticed that lemmy.world’s all seemed different than lemm.ee’s, which in turn was also different than kbin. That’s good to know
I’d love some kind of per community bias adjustment even for subscribed communities. Like, I don’t really want to remove them cause memes are great, but because !memes@lemmy.world and 196 post so often my subscribed feed is pretty dominated by them no matter how I sort it.
For “All” some kind of adjustment based on subscribers makes sense, but I don’t even know if that’s possible given the way Lemmy works. Maybe a “show me less” button that moves the same bias adjustment just for communities you’re not subscribed to?
@dryguy The algorithm needs to be improved. It needs to adjust for the number of boosts/favorites that large communities get. You should be seeing posts from all of the subs you are subscribed too and not just the most popular ones.
Another, related issue to this is that I find the three frontpage categories (All/Local/Subscribed) to be too blunt of a sorting method.
I would really love if we had the option to create subcategories to our Subscribed feed, so we could group related communities and end up with different frontpages for News/Sports/Memes etc.
Being able to filter by language would also be super helpful.
Im sure the Swedish gaming community is great, some lovely Svens and Ingas but I dont speak swedish. Being able to autofilter subs by default language would be awesome.
I too would like a ‘custom feed’ functionality.
Isn’t that what reddit’s “multi Reddit” was all about?
Yes. It’s been discussed on the Lemmy GitHub so it’s in the works, but that’s all I know.
I always hated multi-reddit because it never worked the way I wanted it to.
I wanted it to give me an r/all setup for a specific sets of subreddits. What it did was just give posts from every subreddit in the list, including ones that hadn’t had posts in months. It was just trash to try to use.
This was an issue Reddit used to have circa 2015. Front page was all League of Legends posts, and then it was all The_Donald posts. Then Reddit screwed up their algorithm and it was literally 100% The_Donald posts.
The important takeaway here is that it took a long time before it was actually good. They had to try a bunch of different sorting algorithms before they found one that really worked and let you see your small subs just as much as your big ones.
It might take a while here too unfortunately.
Fun fact. r/leagueoflegends was one of the most filtered subreddits from r/all at one point.
I don’t need another t_d vietnam flashbacks man, don’t jinx it.
Sorting by new works pretty well for me. There’s still the couple of them showing up, but there’s a lot more variety to what I see that way.
I think there should still be a strictly chronological feed that isn’t algorithmic, but blocking the bots that import a lot of low quality content from reddit would be easier than blocking the individual subs.
Can’t you just sort by new?
Someone from reddit should quit and recreate their algorithm for front page.
I see a wider variety of active topics by sorting All by New Comments.
Hmm I might need to try that with the front-page. I had noticed it seemed to just be the same topics daily.
