this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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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 [email protected] and [email protected] 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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

There's plenty of communities where I have no interest in discussing things with the masses. I like smaller communities with thoughtful posters who care more about the subject matter than being heard. That's the beauty of Lemmy. Not everything has to be perfect for everyone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Engagement does not exclusively mean commenting or posting; voting is also engagement. If you just want to lurk, why have an account in the first place?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I didn't say I wanted to lurk. I'm just saying I find beehaw's Technology community more to my preference than LW's

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

That's fair, I guess I just don't see the connection to OP. From how you phrased this I assumed you were disagreeing.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago (3 children)

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)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

I think to trying meet all of these without compromises (such as privacy and performance) is basically impossible. How would one boost engagement on positive emotions or personalize without large data mining efforts, model building, and running text classification on every comment or post?

I agree they are good aspirations.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

This looks cool, but I would prefer to not pass my credentials to a third party, especially for features that should probably be in the default client.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

I made quiblr. It's a lemmy client that includes a For You option

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 days ago (6 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The "duplicate" 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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Thats why i said client side view. Each servers community doesnt know i'm viewing 3 communities together on my phone and it doesnt affect them

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Nah. The different character of the communities and their history makes them unique and special, hiding that for broad appeal is unnecessary.

No need to muddy the waters with weird client-side obfuscations, one big one almost always wins and the other gets reposts, while subscribing to both is trivial if one wishes

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago

The balkanization is a massive problem though because instead of one, active, community we have 3 or 4 dead ones. There needs to be a critical mass of users before communities can afford to start splintering, and that just isn't here.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 days ago

Multicommunities would also help with that. News communities would not flood your general feed anymore if you were able to have a specific feed for them

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (6 children)

PieFed has some features that I find helpful in this regard.

One is the Categories of Communities. You'll only see News in the News category or in the non-category search methods (standard Subscribed/All/New/etc.).

Another is the ability to follow - and arguably more important unfollow - everything. Including communities, posts, people, etc. I once made the mistake of replying to a comment in [email protected], and another in Lemmygrad.ml, and the replies kept coming for WEEKS and WEEKS - I almost quit the Fediverse entirely at that point, and I hear that scenario repeated by others as well. But on PieFed, not only can I unfollow any conversation at any time, but unlike Lemmy it also allows a true blocking of all users from any instance you choose (edit: to clarify, I mean without requiring an admin to do it for you and everyone else on the same instance at the same time - a personal defederation that affects nobody else, just like a block, except that Lemmy doesn't allow blocking users from instances, only communities from instances which is nowhere close to being the same thing).

Ofc nothing is perfect - e.g. I decided to unfollow [email protected] bc I don't want to read 5 of those in a row every morning, and rather would want to savor just one at a time. Also it would be nice to separate comment replies (that seem more urgent, for the sake of an active conversation) from e.g. a new post that you haven't seen yet? But for a true niche community, with let's say less than a handful of posts every day and you want to be notified about every single one? It seems perfect for that.

The UI for PieFed needs far more polish, especially outside of the narrow range of short comments on posts with few of those in number. e.g. far too often the existing notifications don't work as the reply to your comment got buried away onto some other page entirely, in an effort to streamline reading but then that not interacting well with the newer (unfinished?) notifications feature. But while it lacks much polish that Lemmy's UI and apps have, it also has so many features like those mentioned above that Lemmy lacks as well, and may move faster in its development due to using a more common programming language. It is so nice to have choices to pick from:-).

Otherwise on Lemmy you could make alts, like one subscribed to News communities, another for Memes and Shitposts, etc. Blocking users would get super annoying bc you'd have to do it multiple times. Blocking the largest news communities and the accounts that usually fill them, and then sorting by New can help, but it requires enormous curation efforts to get there and even then falls far short of what you asked - e.g. you also, still have to bookmark or otherwise check each one of your highly active communities one by one (edit: I mean niche ones here, bc the chances of seeing a post there on New can still be slim, if you are concerned about seeing EVERY post there rather than just find something to read from across hundreds of subscribed communities, so different solutions for different workflows).

Lemmy is great for checking memes, reading tech or politics news, and liking Linux - but for everything else it needs improvements to be made to support. I'm not going back to Reddit though:-).

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 days ago (3 children)

I mentioned scaled sort in my post. Yes it boosts communities with less activity (in practice this tends to be midsized communities as I mentioned in my post), but it does so generally. What my post is advocating for is a sort that boosts the communities you tend to engage with a lot, not every community that is less active.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

Man, do I have good news for you:

nodeBB

Discourse

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Let’s say I’m subscribed to [email protected] and [email protected] because I want to occasionally see news.

I have this exact problem and it's maddening. Fucking "news", which is mostly just political posts about how shitty Republicans are completely drowns out all of my smaller niche communities!

I don't know how to fix the problem but the USER needs some way to control their feed. We either need to be able to throttle the larger communities or boost the smaller ones.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Try Quiblr. It's a lemmy client with exactly the features you ask for. It checks your engagement, and filters and sorts your feed based on what it learned from your habits.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Weird question, but does it not have a Subscribed view? I can't find it anywhere

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Although there were some proposed solutions for this issue, when scaled sort was implemented, @[email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

If there are still problems you should open a new issue. We cant leave issues open forever because they go stale and dont account for new features. By the way we are planning to implement multi-communities.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

By the way we are planning to implement multi-communities.

Hello,

Any (even very rough) idea on when you guys will be able to work on it? Three, six, nine months?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

No worries, thanks for answering

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] that I enjoy much more now - the latter created only a few days ago, check it out!:-)

Also [email protected]. 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I'd love custom feeds, it was the one of the things I really liked about reddit

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