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

dryguy@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 565 points –

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 Memes@lemmy.ml or 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone.

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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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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.