Anyone else missing posts in smaller Lemmy communities because they are overshadowed by the popular ones?

EternalExplorer@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 299 points –

I tend to miss posts in smaller communities, no matter what sorting options I use when I display the "Subscribed" feed on the frontpage.

If I sort by "New", unsurprisingly most new posts are on the popular communities. Same if I select "Hot", "Active", or "Top Hour" etc. Overall it makes sense, small communities don't have new content as often, and threads there are not that "active" as there not many users.

I think the algorithm should somehow ensure a more diverse feed. There also no "multi-reddits" atm, so you can't just create a feed of those smaller communities.

Of course, I could create another account and only subscribe to small communities, but that's inconvenient. Simply checking them manually is what I do atm, but it's also not that convenient. A temporal solution might be using the RSS feeds, but overall it seems something should be done about it on Lemmy's end.

So, anyone else experiencing that or am I missing something? Because if I am not the only one then perhaps this issue should be brought to the attention of the devs (if it wasn't already).

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You should go see the github for lemmy-ui. There is feature request to add the weight of the community into account so we don't only see the most popular post from the biggest communities. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues

That'd be great. Currently 90% of my feed is /c/memes and while I do find them entertaining, I also miss a ton of posts from smaller communities related to my hobbies that I would engage with more.

It's also preventing smaller subs from being discovered and growing.

Seems there's a PR for a "best" sorting option, which sorts by the top post from each sub, and then the second place post from each sub, and so on.

Sounds perfect.

I haven't looked at the PR, but if it's really that simple, that doesn't seem like the full solution. I don't particularly want a sub with 10 users popping up on the front page after 3 upvotes just because it got to the top of that sub. Sub weight, as mentioned in the top comment here, should probably be taken in to account.

Then don't subscribe to that 10 person sub?

Doesn’t stop them from showing up via All and Local, which is what I want to do without having the completely block these communities. Just my preference.

I blocked meme, shitposting and 196.

All is nicer now.

I liked some of the memes but they were too many

Best solution I’ve found is to block all of that on the main account and just switch over to another account if you feel like seeing the memes.

Yeah, I had to leave memes because it was my whole feed. I feel like one of lemmy's biggest potential selling points would be a scriptable feed. There are some small communities I want to see every post in, and other huge ones that I only want to see maybe the top 5 from.

I've unfollowed /c/memes for exactly this reason. Not that I don't like them, but I wanna see "literally anything else"

Yeah it would be really great to be able to make a temporary filter, like I'd love to be able to have my homepage without any content from Memes without having to unsubscribe

I finally created my lemmy account specifically so that I could browse lemmy.ml again without seeing memes all over the home page!

That’s bloody brilliant. I hope it’s implemented soon.

The problem is I mostly use lemmy(or reddit before) on mobile, so sadly all this neat stuff doesn't help me

If web adds it, it is likely many apps will follow suit. It's all open source after all.

yeah, having everything taken over by memes is annoying.

You can block them. It's so much nicer with them gone.

I want to see them, I just want Lemmy to distribute them more evenly among other communities in the feed. As others have suggested the sorting algorithm should weigh each score inversely by the average score of posts in that community.

There’s currently a PR for something like that

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3378

Wow. I'm kinda impressed that that's already in the works.

I'm rather pleased with how many developers have gotten involved with the project. Looks like the work might not be finished yet on this feature, but it's definitely on its way!

After the stability issues with Lemmy were addressed (and they have been, for the most part...) the next thing that needed a revamp was content aggregation. It's too stale. It's no wonder they're pilling on to address it.

IIRC it took quite a while for Reddit to find an algorithm that worked, and it constantly needs tweaking. It will here, as well.

This seems ideal. I hope it makes it in soon.

Aslong as it hides posts that are old from a less active community.

I don't need a 14day old post popping up on the front page all the time

From what I've read in the changed code, you can select what duration you want to show the best posts for:

  • BestAll
  • BestYear
  • BestNineMonths
  • BestSixMonths
  • BestThreeMonths
  • BestMonth
  • BestWeek
  • BestDay
  • BestTwelveHour
  • BestSixHour
  • BestHour

A smart sort would be great. Maybe even some custom settings for it, like weights for community, upvotes, replies, etc.

You mean, like an algorithm?

Funny how things go isn't it

@peter @argentcorvid algorithms aren't evil, the important part was always control over how it works.

The fediverse is in an excellent position to first recreate the problem of having too much and then someone will take one for the team and develop some easy to configure filter that weights things properly.

Give it 6 months...

Yeah it's the reason, back on Reddit, that I'm able to see posts from smaller subreddits show up near the top of my feed because it's popular relative to the number of subscribers of that subreddit.

I'd even go further and claim that any post on the smallest sub should be more important than almost any other post on a larger one.

You did subscribe to it so you want to know.

"Hot" just needs to weight the upvotes by the relative size (or average post upvotes) of that community, so you can see whatever is "relatively Hot" within each.

Yeah, I've actually just unsubscribed from !memes@lemmy.ml because otherwise it was the only community to appear in my subscribed feed. One thing reddit did well and I miss on lemmy was giving visiblility to posts on smaller subscribed communities when sorting by hot

Yeah 90% is just the memes community because its so big, memes are a big part why i joined reddit and now lemmy, but it's just to much, i want variety at my feed!

Especially with the retro memes thing going on, I found it funny like the first 10 post, but it's getting on my nerves already. I wonder what people that came here just now have to think

I look forward to when "multireddits" are implemented in Lemmy, I used that feature all the time on Reddit.

Although it'd still be an issue that the smaller communities are simply lacking in activity in general, I guess.

I do like talking to myself IRL too, but there's a limit to even that lol

I didn't use that on Reddit but it seems like it would be more useful here since basically the same community can pop up multiple times on different instances.

sadly i don't think it's coming soon, i looked at github, there you can open a "issue" (feature ideas, bugs). One of the rules is no multiple issues, so searched if someone requested it and there is one about mutireddits thats chilling there since 2020 and another from 2021

We could vote/comment on the existing issue to potentially get it on a priority list

I have kinda solved this accidentally. I have accounts on multiple instances. One them has no filters and the other one has all meme communities blocked and nsfw turned off. Now if I load all@lemmy.world I see everything, but all@feddit.nl is a nicely trimmed feed.

This works well if you use Liftoff on android at least.

I had to block one of the meme's communities for now because there were times where one person would post 4 different memes within seconds of each other, they would all get upvoted, and now a 4th of the page are memes

Not that I dislike memes, but it was happening for most of the day. It did convince me to specialize my subscribed list a bit more though.

I use different accounts for different purposes. One for generic tech news, another one for niche hobbies

i have accounts for languages one for English (lemmy.blahaj.zone) and one for estonian (lemm.ee)

This guy took the lemm.ee TLD literally

I just unsubscribe from communities which appear in All anyway, it's a pretty good solution IMO.

With you on this. I don’t like current Lemmy/kbin sorting methods. Most of my subscribed feed is filled with like 5 top communities, but I’m actually interested in those so I don’t want to block them.

It would be great if posts from smaller communities were injected into the feed even if they don’t really meet the “hot” requirements.

For me at least, that's true on lemmy, but not so much on kbin - my feed there is seems to include smaller communities too.

I’m on kbin myself, and tech/news/similar communities seem to dominate the feed. Do you have similar large ones in your feed?

Kind of - but a lot of my communities just don't get more than one post per day, so that limits the diversity a lot.

You might need to remove some of those popular communities to extract what you are actually looking for. Because the posts from the popular communities stay on the top of your list. That worked for me.

I’m using Voyager and there’s a Home feed that shows only posts from my subscribed communities. It’s not as good as multi-reddits, but it’s better than checking each community individually for new posts.

The web pages for Lemmy and kbin have the ability to filter by subscribed communities, as well. I think what most of us are thinking of is a way to view the "All" feed that gives more weight to the smaller communities, which would help us discover new communities to subscribe to.

Yes, but I figure that's just the way it will go until the community grows. Give it another couple months of growth and reddit exodus then I imagine we'll see far more QOL updates to Lemmy and Jerboa.

Had to block some of the meme communities there for this very reason. My feed no matter what was meme after meme. Blocking them has made the all feed much better.

I used reddit in a way where I would check out my front page, and then go to my favorite (smaller) subs to specifically look for things that wouldn't make it to the front page. Unfortunately, I've not followed through with that after leaving reddit, because I'm on kbin and it's pretty annoying to get to your followed magazines (as they're called), and I see indications about making some of them "favorite" but I don't think that functionality actually exists yet.

I'm sure it will get there eventually.

I've been on here a lot, and I use the different sorts. The think with smaller communities is how many times do you want to show the post that was made last week as new? Until someone comments in them or makes another post it's not going to bring it up in new or hot.

Maybe a random sort option could help?

But it really comes down to engagement. Engage with the smaller communities and they'll show up more.