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’m with you 100%. I did find that searching by hot comes out a little better. But I think I’m finally ready to just block the meme and the rule subs.
Also there’s just not as much content here as. Reddit. That will eventually change,
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?
I thought OP was talking about sorting by new but I was mistaken.
That just gives you what’s new. I’m looking for what is new and popular. I usually browse by top 6 hours.
I’m definitely not suggesting that any of the existing feeds need to be done away with. They all have their uses.
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 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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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’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 [email protected] 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?
Someone from reddit should quit and recreate their algorithm for front page.
No, thanks. Their front page is rage baity shit
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.
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
As more people join these kinds of things will change and evolve. Hopefully the site infrastructure will adapt to it as well.
