cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/52386265

Right now, big communities dominate the feed. I’m wondering what sort algorithm could level the field so niche or hobbyist communities have a fair chance to get seen.

There’s a good related post: Niche Communities won’t be able to reach their true potential until Lemmy adds a sort that takes engagement into account. It puts it well:

“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.”

What do you think should be the default sort for a more balanced Lemmy?

    • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      You realise if Lemmy/Piefed even doubled in size, /new/ would just be useless. Just a wave of low quality posts, spam, and topically non-relevant posts to most people.

      It doesn’t scale.

        • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
          0·
          9 months ago

          But that also happens with the Hot and Popular filters.

          I use /hot/ for local and subscribed posts after not looking at them for a day or so sometimes.

          If someone could only look by /new/ on the /all/ anything older than an hour or so would just be completely gone unless they kept scrolling. The feed would be irrelevant to most people or dominated by frequent posters who flood their communities. In fact, it would make it more desirable for community owners to flood communities full of low-effort posts as the only way to attain visibility would be to be ever-present on the /new/ feed.

          Because if I just swipe through the All option across all the federated instances using the Hot or Popular filters it’s mostly memes, circlejerking and rageposting. Is this what is wanted? Because nobody needs Lemmy for that. Reddit and all of the other platforms are already serving that low level of engagement with slop to spare.

          Why do you imagine a mandatory sort by /new/ would be less likely to be a feed of memes, circlejerking and rageposting?

          This actively rewards it. Exactly the same way.

          As I said: Only /new/ existing would make it more desirable for community owners to flood communities full of low-effort posts as the only way to attain visibility would be to be ever-present on the /new/ feed.

          I don’t know what you want out of lemmy, but if that outcome is what you intend to have, the end product will have virtually no distinction of its’ counterparts and people will see no reason to change. As there will be none outside of it’s not “corporate owned”. But if it’s still slop, people who want a change, will just skip the whole thing. As I did for a while. And if it wasn’t for Piefed, I don’t think I would be still hanging around here anymore either.

          A platforming being ‘slop’ won’t be any less slop purely because it removes its /hot/ feed. In fact, you might as well just outright remove upvotes and downvotes at that rate. And then it just isn’t a reddit alternative anymore.

          I have not used those filters in a long time. But I’m betting that the enraged posting about what’s happening in the U.S. (and justifiably so), shitposting, circlejerking, memes and Tankies causing controversy again are taking the entire feed until one gets bored. If I’m wrong I bet is not by much. But hell, I could’ve stayed on reddit for that back when I was there which was a while ago.

          You can just outright remove all of the ‘tankie’ instances from your own viewing if you want. Especially on Piefed. You can block all the shitpost and circlejerk and meme communities.

          Meanwhile the communities with intellectually engaging posting, real propositions of solutions and thoughtful discussions get slided to nowhere like on every other platform. They’re here and they are incredible. But guess what, they’re also on reddit, youtube, instagram and so on. And they get even more traction than in here. And also no traction in comparison to everywhere else. Just like here. But they do still get more people than here in the end.

          What communities are you referring to here?

          So what is the appeal of changing?

          Well I came here because I wanted to run a particular community that I couldn’t run or help on reddit. Reddit has exhausted itself for people who want to community build. Almost all names are taken.

          There are many other issues with Reddit too: people being able to hide their post history (thus making it much easier for bad faith accounts to hide their posting history), no voting visibility (I didn’t know the Fediverse had this before I joined, but it’s very good in that it cultivates a high-trust culture), a broken block system, and its beginning to administrate via AI tools meaning people are getting their posts hidden or removed based on its poor understanding. On the Fediverse you can actually directly interact with instance owners and admins, making each instance much more accountable to users - and if you don’t like how one community is run in one instance, you can create it elsewhere and take their users (if enough people agree).

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      Algorithm is not a dirty word. Any sorting or filtering is an algorithm. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean we need to kill it off, just don’t use them.