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 doesnāt 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 userās 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 itās a tiny community.
Letās say Iām subscribed to !world@lemmy.world and !news@lemmy.world because I want to occasionally see news. However, Iām also subscribed to a couple hundred other communities, some of them who donāt manage to get more than a couple upvotes on their biggest posts. And whenever I see them Iām replying/upvoting because Iām passionate about that topic.
My feed shouldnāt be 95% c/news and c/world because those are the most upvoted and commented. I shouldnāt have to scroll down hundreds of posts to find ābigā posts in small communities I interact with at any opportunity I get.
Thatās why I think it would be beneficial to lemmy if the sort/algorithm took into account your engagement in a way.
It doesnāt have to be complicated, you can have a single number āengagement scoreā for every community calculated with a basic formula, and that number is used as a boost to the community.
Iām aware that there are some examples of successful niche communities on lemmy. But thatās mainly because either a significant chunk of the lemmy userbase is into that niche (letās 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 donāt know much about the subject.
The biggest problem with lemmy for me is the multiple āduplicateā communities.
There should be a feature to combine them at the client level. So the 3 different āprivacyā communities could just be viewed as one on my lemmy client
The āduplicateā communities are housed on different websites. Websites that could very well have their own norms, rules, and culture. Lumping them together and treating them as the same thing is just kind of invasive to them, and promotes bad netiquette.
Just pick one that you like best.
Thats why i said client side view. Each servers community doesnt know iām viewing 3 communities together on my phone and it doesnt affect them
Yeah, but you are still treating them as subsets of a singular whole.
Donāt do that. Itās actively bad for the ecosystem, and will trend things toward mega-community mono-spaces where people just snipe at each other for karma.