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 !world@lemmy.world and !news@lemmy.world 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.
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
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.
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
Yeah, but you are still treating them as subsets of a singular whole.
Don't do that. It's actively bad for the ecosystem, and will trend things toward mega-community mono-spaces where people just snipe at each other for karma.
Nah. The different character of the communities and their history makes them unique and special, hiding that for broad appeal is unnecessary.
No need to muddy the waters with weird client-side obfuscations, one big one almost always wins and the other gets reposts, while subscribing to both is trivial if one wishes
The balkanization is a massive problem though because instead of one, active, community we have 3 or 4 dead ones. There needs to be a critical mass of users before communities can afford to start splintering, and that just isn't here.
Piefed solves this with topics kind of neatly. You keep the unique communities but they are all in one place
How are comments handled? Are they combined as well, or are they still fractured?
A few apps have multi-community support where you can group whatever you want, how you want, in one stream. I'm using Summit, but I feel a few other of the bigger apps support it now. I group the AskLemmys, tv/movie communities and different art communities into groups so I can view by category.
You rang?
I was considering doing a megathread about consolidating various communities hosted on an assortment of instances but it probably would’ve too much.