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] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Isn't that the difference between "active" and "hot?"

One is just upvotes; the other is votes and comments.

I don't think it would help, to be honest. A dead community not being posted to still won't show up on your feed if you sort by engagement.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

read my post, not just the title.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

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] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Nice. I will try it. Do I have to keep Quiblr cookies for the option to work?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Quiblr's For You feed should still work without cookies. Let me know if it works for you

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 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 5 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 5 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 5 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 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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] 15 points 1 week ago (7 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 5 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.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago (9 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 1 week 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 1 week 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] 20 points 1 week 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] 16 points 1 week 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 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Scaled sort was implemented in 0.19.0, is that not sufficient? https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-12-15_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.0_-_Instance_blocking,_Scaled_sort,_and_Federation_Queue

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week 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] 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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] 8 points 1 week 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] 2 points 6 days ago

Just replying here with the community link [email protected]

because it doesn’t seem to be federated with my instance, it will once I subscribe though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

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

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