YSK: Sorting by 'Hot' instead of 'Active' will show more diverse content on Lemmy

Navarian@lemm.ee to You Should Know@lemmy.world – 1155 points –

I've seen a few mentions of people feeling like they're constantly seeing the same content when sorting by active, I've since moved to hot, and I'm having a much better time.

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The problem with sorting by hot, at least on my instance, is that I always seem to wind up looking at a post from years ago mixed in with more recent stuff. That's not a problem per se, but I find myself almost responding to a conversation that happened a long time ago.

Tell your instance admin to restart the Lemmy service every so often. We have ours restart every six hours since that fixes the hot thing breaking and getting stale.

Larger instances might not be able to restart often as it could leave some interactions in limbo.

Thanks for the tip! And I happen to be the admin, lol. I'll set a cron job to restart the lemmy container and see what changes.

I've set it to restart every six hours.

You should know you'll lose the outbound queue of interactions everytime you restart. I was also under the impression that the big this was supposed to be a work around for had been fixed in 0.18.

What command do you use to restart the Lemmy service?

Sorting by hot also shows me a bunch of nsfw communities for some reason

Oh, maybe lemmy.world is using another definition of "hot." ;)

To be fair, r/all would always have tons of NSFW posts before reddit started filtering them from the front page ~2 years ago.

I started sorting by day because of seeing stuff from days ago thay hasn't been touched. Active and hot have been broken.

Does your instance updated to latest version of Lemmy? Afaik, since 0.18 active and hot mostly work as intended

For the past two days I actually haven’t seen any outdated posts by sorting “hot”. It’s working pretty good for me in wefwef and Memmy.

Wish we had a "rising" option. That was my fav on reddit

Yeah, I second this, used it a fair amount myself.

Lemmy's hot has some aspects of rising in it. Even posts with very few votes stay fairly high up if they got those votes early.

Top Hour is the same as Reddit's rising option.

Hot for discovery.

Active to check in on ongoing discussions.

Use both, they are for different things.

Yes agreed. I do hope this is mentioned somewhere because I can see someone getting frustrated and leaving the site

The sorting algorithm still needs some work.

it's reminiscent of the iTunes shuffle at launch. the shuffle was truly random, so with a large enough user base, some people were annoyed that the same artist might get played multiple times in a row. it's a possibility in true random generations, but it felt wrong, so they fixed it and made rules for shuffle so it seemed more random

Helped me to block some communities I was not interested in, now it's much better.

Well, all the sort options are rational. You just have to use the one you prefer. How would you sort posts differently ?

I miss rising and best on reddit gave me better experience. And I have not the slightest idea what a good sorting algorithm might be, I just can tell if it works for me or not. What helped me here, is blocking the communities I was not interested in, now the feeds are much more to my liking.

I need something that works well for both small and large communities. Active and top basically only shows big communities. I want some form of "top" that's actually relative to the norm for that community (both in terms of votes and how many posts the community gets). I'd rather not see completely new posts (I often like someone else to take the "first pass"), but don't want to completely miss content in small communities.

In fact, right now, it seems like the only way to see stuff in smaller communities is to specifically browse that community? That's the only way I've ever seen posts from my tiny local city community. It has posts, but they've never once showed up on my subscribed front page.

Seems you also sometimes get resurrected 1Y+ necro posts in 'Hot', but otherwise yeah you get a lot more post diversity

I noticed this too but went to lemmyverse.net and subbed to a bunch of new things, and unsubscribed from some memes communities that were posting way too much.

I have default sort of top 6 hours, works well for fresh content.

Sort by New Comments if you wanna go back to the way old forums work where new posts and posts with new comments get pushed right to the top and decay based on getting pushed down by other new and active topics of discussion. If you do it while browsing All, you will always see the hottest topics that are active.

Wow, the advice I didn't know I needed. You're rapidly becoming my favorite fellow lemming.

I always sort by All and New. In fact it's my default feed setting on my Liftoff app.

Same. When I have exhausted my subscribe feed I then go to All - New.

Yeah, I do this alongside sorting by Hot, switching between the two frequently.

Lol. But then you get a bunch of posts from c/Colorado from their news bot and Right now it's a bunch of posts from nrc. Haha.

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But sometimes you get a lot of posts in foreign languages. But at least you get to discover new communities and re-emerging ones that come over from Reddit.

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I love the TOP x hours sort. My default is 6 but if I notice seeing the same content, top 1 hour fixes that

Wouldn't one downside of this be that smaller communities will not appear though?

I think you're right. If you want to explore the lemiverse I think all->hot is your best bet.

Yes, I discovered it yesterday, but while now the content is new every time, IMO its quality has decreased a lot (mainly memes, shower thoughts or news about Reddit or Musk).

Block the memes and things looks better :)

Can I just block memes from the /all feed?

I sort by TopDay and that seems to get me quite popular content, but Hot is also good for new stuff. Love the options for sorting on Connect for Lemmy

I don’t understand what “Hot” sorts by. When I use that setting, I see a bunch of threads from a few minutes ago with no comments yet. How is that “hot”?

I've always thought it's the amount of upvotes a post is getting and how quickly it's getting them

Does anyone know how to short comments by top default.

I find All > New brings up a lot of content. Local is okay for lemmy.world but there's a lot on federated servers too, which is sort of the whole idea of lemmy so I wouldn't want to leave those out. It also seems there isn't enough of a difference between Hot and Active.

Mind if I ask a stupid question? I’m seeing lemm.ee more and more thanks to Memmy displaying it under usernames. How is it different from lemmy.world? Sorry if this should be obvious, still getting used to the fediverse.

It's understandable to be confused. The easiest way to wrap your head around it is to think of it like the difference between Gmail and Hotmail, they both have the same purpose and do the same thing (showing you emails) but they are on different servers run by different people.

Lemmy.ml -- lemmy.world -- lemm.ee -- etc.
They are all servers that connect together. Some posts, pictures, and profiles are saved to one server, some are saved on another. All of that is accessible between all of them.

Gotcha, I think more or less I already understood that much. I meant more so how do they (lemmy.world vs lemm.ee specifically) differentiate from one another?

Is it simply the instances they federate with or is it the ones they block? Is there a “goal” for them worth considering when picking one? I only picked lemmy.world because it was the most popular. Saw that OP is from lemm.ee so thought I’d ask this here.

So for example: I’m somewhat interested in seeing how things go when threads users get included in the fediverse. I saw a post from lemm.ee basically saying they were considering it while another preemptively blocked them.

Sorry if this is too specific lol.

So you can already kinda see how the different instances differ.

They all for the most part run the same server which means they will all look the same. The difference then comes down to how they will manage the server and moderate the users.

I can't give specifics between lemm.ee and lemmy.world because I haven't really seen much from the admins. I know Ruud, the admin of lemmy.world, also hosts large instances of other federated platforms like Mastodon, so it can be assumed they are experienced with hosting and there will likely be limited service interruptions that other instances may face.

One instance may be more relaxed with controversial topics and not block them from happening, one may want to defedare with certain instances because they simply don't agree with their viewpoint even if others may be interested in hear from other viewpoints, one instance may not want to update to the latest Lemmy version right away which means things might be slow or not work as well until they do update.

I'm sorry if you are looking for the actual specific difference between lemmy.world and lemm.ee, but ideally the administration of an instance should be transparent to you.

Don’t be sorry, your replies were helpful and informative. I didn’t even consider server performance.

Server performance is a big one, lemmy.world was really slow for a while because it was the biggest one

Well you also have to consider the philosophy of your admins. They can block and censor anything for you basically. You might join an instance that removes posts critical of a certain country, etc.

But mostly it's just about who they defederate

Got it. So why did you pick thelemmy.club?

Actually, I run thelemmy.club

So I get to make all those decisions. I try to be fairly laid back though as I have over 100 users now (though only a dozen or two active ones)

As a seperate note, you can click the Instances button at the bottom of the page to see the other instances that are being federated and being blocked by the instance you're on.

Thank you for the tip! I've been trying to figure out how to find instances and add them which is a whole nother thing..one step at to figure it out.

I only found this post because I finally sorted by hot instead of active.

There are also new “top” options, and really “new” isn’t a bad option.

Lol glad this was posted. I figured it out the 2nd day (July 2nd) but I'm GLAD it was finally confirmed with this and wasn't just a placebo

Hot subscribed is my default but I cycle through all the different sort settings. Thanks to lemmycommunityseeder I have a All feed that’s populated like a bigger instance on my personal instance

Can I make it sort by hot by default?

Yes, you can find those options under Sort Type in your profile settings if you're using the web version. I'm sure each of the apps has that option as well.

I like/dislike the seen posts to mark them as seen and mave my account configured to hide seen posts. No duplicates.

I prefer sorting by active to se posts with more comments.

Also, changing your front page from local only/subscribed to all will show you all posts your instance can see.

I switch between hot and new. Then I'll sort by new comments. Then top if I'm really out of new stuff.

I try to only follow the communities on my instance. I don't like having the delays between one instance and others so I'll just stick to this place where it's all in real time

Plus if any defederation happens it has less impact

This seems like a key indicator that federation in general might not be solved for correctly or can’t work out in the long run

Probably not, no. I expect the biggest instance to be the one that keeps growing and the others will be obstensibly connected but mostly small or abandoned.

It's not like federation is really the way it was sold. It's not a bad system, but it's not really how the internet works. Or more accurately not how people work. Users, customers, don't really want it to work like that. Theoretically Threads is federated too. Not like their users are going to be chiming in to this thread.

When I first got here, I found hot was showing a lot of older posts but that seems less the case as time goes on. I think it's a question of more and more new content appearing now with communities starting to flourish, so it doesn't fall back on the older stuff as much? It's a good sign!