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Viewing lemmy posts by all tends to be dominated by a few communities

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.

pistachio ,

I fully agree. On reddit i would use the all frontpage to find new communities. Here it doesnt work.

souperk ,

yes! yes! yes! I have the same problem.

My suggestion is to add a view with subscriptions ordered by the selected criterion (i.e. new/active/hot/top) and below each community there is vertical list with posts from that community sorted.

This would allow see what’s up with the communities we follow and then jump in those communities if we find anything interesting.

roi ,

My people

WolfhoundRO ,

Rule

roi ,

Rule

Chickenstalker , (edited )

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.

No_Money_Just_Change ,

Newest comments works best for me as it gives a nice mix of big and small posts

Emu ,
@Emu@lemmy.ml avatar

Most communities I’m in just seem to post about Reddit and its soooo boring, like get a life and make original content

Socialphilosopher ,

If a community has grown a lot, unfortunately it takes up all the posts on the homepage. If I were a developer, I would sort by weighted success. For example, if the “x” community has 1000 subscribers and the post gets 100 likes, it has ten percent success. If the other ‘y’ community has 100 people and gets 11 likes, it has 11 percent success. This overrides the post in community x because the post in community y is more successful. This is the logic of ‘weighted success’. With this logic, a better ranking formula can be created.

neuromancer ,
@neuromancer@lemmy.world avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    Kolanaki ,
    @Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

    I figured that’s what Id see sorting by New Comments but that hasn’t actually been the case. Any new post or post with a new comment gets pushed up to the top immediately and doesn’t even take into account votes, but even refreshing the page all day doesn’t catch a lot of small communities unless they are also attracting attention.

    Aceticon ,

    The thing is, a 10% upvoted post on a 10,000 people community is more popular than a 90% upvoted post on a 1000 people community - those 10,000 people in the former community are 10,000 people interested enough in that kind of thing to subscribe, whilst only 1000 people are interested enough in the other kind of thing.

    So it does make sense to put the former higher up in the global page when sorted by popularity because globally that post was more popular.

    However I do think there should be someway to as a user push down posts from certain communities without outright blocking the whole thing: maybe som throttling-down based on the rate of posts per time (i.e. the upvote threshold for posts from a community to come out in All depends on the number of otherwise qualifying posts in the last X days/hours, thus explicitly targetting the “flooding with posts” itself) rather than the straight count of upvotes or the proportion of upvotes that you suggest.

    That said in the meanwhile I’m really tempted to block the more generic meme communities.

    souperk ,

    General popularity is not a good metric IMO. If I like a community, then it shouldn’t matter if a million people like or it’s only me and my cousin. If the community likes the content, I want to see it.

    It’s trust between the members of a community.

    However, weighted sorting is not a solution too, upvotes counts are not linear. Maybe, quantile sort?

    Aceticon ,

    What’s liked by the general population is a good metric for providing general stuff to the general population and that’s what we’re talking about in All.

    That average can however deviate a lot from the sweet spot for some people, quite possibly a large minority (even the majority depending on how concentrated or not people’s tastes are around it).

    Something that looks at your previous choices (or even generally stated choices in the form of communities you subscribe to or block) similarly to what some search engines and some social media sites will do, can shift that toward more your own specific tastes, but that’s computationally more expensive and requires more users and more user data to get better results (basically it’s finding certain kinds of users and local minima which are more satisfactory to them).

    I suspect something like an AI solution (not LLM, just a much simpler neural network) running on your own device that tries to predict what you’re going to click on and learns with what you do (or not) is the only way for a personalized “no fluff on my feed” solution, but that’s for apps running on top of Lemmy, not the Lemmy engine.

    theneverfox ,

    I’m right there with you - I’m making an app called flemmy, and I have 12 more tasks on my list before I’m putting it on the play store - should be this weekend at the latest. Iphone build shouldn’t be that far behind. I can also make a desktop build if anyone wants it, but right now have no intentions to host a site myself - I strongly feel the data the app collects shouldn’t leave your device

    Version 1 is about creating something close to the Reddit apps I used to use, and it’s there - just needs a little more polish (and to let you post… I’m more of a commenter, so I forgot that was a thing for an embarrassingly long time)

    I can support all sorts of filters, from keywords to hiding specific posts to “snoozing” communities. I can also save your place when you change sort methods or accounts - it’s what I always wanted for Reddit.

    Also, I have support for redirecting links - Twitter to nitter, YouTube to pipe, etc.

    Version 2 is going to focus on your feed. Already I connect to multiple servers (it’s a real headache, but the foundation is there), so next is stitching feeds together and custom feed algorithms. What you mention is at the top of my list - a way to tweak the feed based on all sorts of filters.

    Ideally, I want it to adapt to you - using upvotes and comments to tweak your feed. All on your phone - it’s amazing what you can do on a phone when you’re not interested in data collection

    I just made !flemmy, I’ll post some screenshots when I need a longer break

    bonnetbee ,

    Awesome, that you develop tools for lemmy! Thank you.

    A question: Did you consider to publish your app on the F-Droid-Store? I only use apps from there and the only usable app for lemmy is jerboa. An alternative to that would be awesome, as it has quite a lot of problems.

    JubilantJaguar ,

    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.

    PixelProf ,

    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.

    BeautifulMind ,
    @BeautifulMind@lemmy.world avatar

    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

    makatwork ,

    The first page problem happens to me, too.

    RaoulDook ,

    I found a workaround to that problem, just do a page refresh after going back from a post to the list of posts.

    SuperFola ,
    @SuperFola@programming.dev avatar

    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!

    Kolanaki ,
    @Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

    I see a wider variety of active topics by sorting All by New Comments.

    gammasfor ,

    Hmm I might need to try that with the front-page. I had noticed it seemed to just be the same topics daily.

    GodOfThunder ,

    This has already been mentioned a few times. Just find the relevant issue on GitHub and give it an upvote.

    • The rank of a post in the aggregated feed should be inversely proportional to the size of the community
    • Weighted Community Subscription for Customized Feed
    • Balance Instance Scores Based on Monthly Active Users
    Generator ,
    @Generator@lemmy.pt avatar

    There’s also a pull request github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3378

    dep ,
    @dep@lemmy.world avatar

    Lgtm!

    Spzi ,

    There’s also a comment by Nutomic (a main dev) which shows they are aware of threads like this:

    There are a lot of user complaints that posts from the same few large communities are always at the top.

    subway ,

    What if you make an alt account that blocks big prominent communities when sorting through /all so you can view the top posts from smaller communities?

    SpamCamel ,

    But then you have to change accounts, which I understand isn’t difficult, though it’s still something that needs to be done proactively by the user. Would be nice to just have a better content ranking algorithm that gives smaller communities a chance.

    Odusei ,

    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.

    spaduf ,
    @spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    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.

    Odusei , (edited )

    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.

    CommunityLinkFixer Bot ,

    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: !newcommunities

    spaduf ,
    @spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    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.

    glimse ,

    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

    Odusei ,

    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.

    glimse ,

    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

    Odusei ,

    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.

    glimse ,

    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?

    Odusei ,

    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.

    glimse ,

    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

    Odusei ,

    I joined because I still want the same content without the asshole owner. I’m here for the different power structure, not because I hated Reddit’s content.

    EssentialCoffee ,

    The goal is likely going to be different based on what community you’re in.

    Coelacanth ,
    @Coelacanth@feddit.nu avatar

    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.

    gonzo0815 ,

    That’s a really great idea!

    Phlogiston ,

    I too would like a ‘custom feed’ functionality.

    Salix ,

    github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818

    FourPacketsOfPeanuts ,

    Isn’t that what reddit’s “multi Reddit” was all about?

    Coelacanth ,
    @Coelacanth@feddit.nu avatar

    Yes. It’s been discussed on the Lemmy GitHub so it’s in the works, but that’s all I know.

    EssentialCoffee ,

    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.

    Delphia ,

    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.

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