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 [email protected] or [email protected].
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 think this problem is relegated to being registered to larger instances. On one hand you get lots to choose from when it comes to your local feed, similar to how Mastodon works, on the other hand you have the problem you just mentioned. I know you bring up the problem of narrowing what you see, but if you’re going to be on a big instance, there really is no other way than to subscribe to those communities you have a specific interest in. I’m on a smaller instance and I just take the time to go through communities that I may have an even fleeting interest in and subscribe to them, avoiding larger generic communities. This is the same strategy I employ when it comes to my news feed as well. I only subscribe to RSS feeds from sites I have an interest in.
My people
Rule
Rule
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.
Fyi the devs aren’t reading this (and probably won’t be before long, since they are busy just coding a lot of features). Best place to ask for this is on the issue tracker (first check if it hasn’t been asked before), even better implement it yourself if you can!
A quick, but a little dirty solution for this, would be communities having “tags” in their metadata. This wouldn’t prevent spam, or an accumulation of four trillion tags, but you could easily add “only these tags,” or “not these tags,” to any feed. User objects have metadata that is used like this (as the “bot” flag) already. I’m just familiar enough with the code to know it wouldn’t be a slam dunk, but it’s also not a breaking change or re-write!
Maybe they could even integrate with Mastodon’s hashtags
Tags would be great, and a much better way of controlling your feed than blocking communities or instances. Just because I usually don’t want to see memes or shitposts doesn’t mean I’m never in the mood for them. It could also potentially help people who don’t want porn in their feed but want to keep non-porn NSFW visible.
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.
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 …
Top from the past 6 or 12 hours works better than Hot IMO. It feels more like the traditional reddit front page.
Thanks for the suggestions, I’ll try that
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!
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.
I don’t need another t_d vietnam flashbacks man, don’t jinx it.
Fun fact. r/leagueoflegends was one of the most filtered subreddits from r/all at one point.
I fully agree. On reddit i would use the all frontpage to find new communities. Here it doesnt work.
Browse by New. Bam! Problem solved! Stop being slaves of the Algo. Actively search for stuff you like while also actively block those you don’t like.
Newest comments works best for me as it gives a nice mix of big and small posts
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.
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: [email protected]
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’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
I don’t know about anyone else’s experience, but I’ve noticed that any time I click into a post view and then back out, I’m taken to the first page of posts, no matter if I was 2 or 3 pages on. If the redirect respected where it came from instead of going to home, that could reduce the impact of post-order sorting. Also if the list pager had more options than ‘prev’ and ‘next’ (maybe a few numbered pages between or beyond) I could get beyond that 3rd page without getting there feeling like an illustration of the schlemiel the painter’s problem
I found a workaround to that problem, just do a page refresh after going back from a post to the list of posts.
The first page problem happens to me, too.
Better solution: don’t use Lemmy as your feed, use a feed reader (RSS). There are per-channel feeds that you can sort and filter using parameters.
Doing things this way will also help create the open web we all want to see, where “forum” is not a synonym for “Reddit” or “Lemmy”, where you can also follow the goings-on in other places and not miss anything.
Yeah, I really think it’s important to not see Lemmy as one singular community, or a lot of important use cases will go ignored.
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.
I’m definitely not suggesting that any of the existing feeds need to be done away with. They all have their uses.
Can’t you just sort by new?
That just gives you what’s new. I’m looking for what is new and popular. I usually browse by top 6 hours.
I thought OP was talking about sorting by new but I was mistaken.
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.
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.
I too would like a ‘custom feed’ functionality.
That’s a really great idea!
