[Proposal] Algorithm for Lemmy
Hey, I am pretty new to this whole fediverse thing an one of the biggest hurdles for me is getting actually started and find communities that are active and match my interests.
I feel that because of the federation I have to take twice the action compared to other alternatives in the sense that I have to actively search for communities I could potentially be interested in and then decide if they are something for me.
Personally I feel an algorithm that combines posts from different communities helps a lot because I only have to look at posts there and if I like them I can join the community it comes from.
Now my question/proposal:
If I understood correctly Lemmy is somewhat compatible with Mastodon, so I will mix some things of both.
I know bot accounts are possible, so what if we used them to create (biased) home pages for Lemmy instances? Like I would imagine these bots get a curated list of communities and once a post reaches a threshold of some sort (like a certain number of likes/comments) the bot "boosts" the post. "Boosting" is taken from Mastodon so idk what the Lemmy equivalent is, potentially posting to a custom community?
Obviously these bots could implement arbitrarily complex algorithms to determine how the 'home page' looks like. And potentially different 'home pages' can exist to choose from depending on the algorithm someone likes. Best of all it would all be optional, so if people don't like an algorithm they just ignore the bot.
What do you think? Does that sound like something you would use? Do you know if that is even possible to actually realize? What are potential drawbacks?
TL:DR Could we potentially use bots to aggregate posts from different communities, with the intention to have a 'home page'?
Sounds like a fun idea, basically a better "all" page.
That being said, if you are on a well-fedorated instance, all page would likely be pretty similar to that. But I think such a community can potentially help smaller instances.
I agree, the experience of searching for a community on Lemmy is really weird--there needs to be a better way of searching for communities that suit your specific interests, and it can get weirded due to the fact that some instances can be more specific than others, or an instance might not be in your federation.
In addition, the communities bar is nice, but it would be cooler if instances and/or communities were sorted into groups--i feel that would be a lot more approachable than a table of communities.
Exactly, this could also allow adding new 'sortings' like 'sort by new' or 'sort by likes' without having to add them to the apps/website.
As an example, the algorithm could try to highlight outstanding posts of smaller communities that otherwise might get overshadowed if simply filtering by most likes in all.
A simple bot could implement this by looking at the average range of likes in a community and then show posts that are significantly above that range.
If you are not convinced that's a good idea, no problem you can just ignore that bot and use a different one or use none at all.