this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 176 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 75 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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

Sweeeeet, pretty close to perfect then. Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Memes, memes as far at the eye can see

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I too would like a 'custom feed' functionality.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

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

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.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I don't need another t_d vietnam flashbacks man, don't jinx it.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] SuperFola 18 points 1 year ago

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!

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

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 [email protected], I'll post some screenshots when I need a longer break

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm definitely not suggesting that any of the existing feeds need to be done away with. They all have their uses.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Can't you just sort by new?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That just gives you what's new. I'm looking for what is new and popular. I usually browse by top 6 hours.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

@dryguy The algorithm needs to be improved. It needs to adjust for the number of boosts/favorites that large communities get. You should be seeing posts from all of the subs you are subscribed too and not just the most popular ones.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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,

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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.

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