I began noticing on Reddit (official mobile app) that if I hadn’t viewed a community in a while, it would NEVER show up in my feed. I always assumed this was Reddit trying to play “Facebook” BS - safe to assume with Lemmy that won’t be the case?
I think the problem I’ve noticed with Lemmy is I tend to only get the more popular communities showing up over and over again. Reddit was at least a little better about showing smaller subreddits I visited in my main feed at least somewhat often. Not sure if I just need to change how I sort on Lemmy, I currently use hot and subscribed.
I find sorting by “new comments” is better for now. Hot seems broken
Hot and active has improved a LOT in the latest RC release, should be coming to an instance near you soon™
Try Top Daily to see new stuff. The ranking will be fixed in a future release of lemmy to sink old but successful post to the bottom of the page and sprinkle in small community content as well.
The code is open source, so you can inspect it yourself.
I doubt there’s much incentive for Devs to implement features that would make Lemmy more facebook-like. There’s no profit motive for it, and there are lots of other features and bug fixes that deserve their attention.
The good thing is lemmy is so new that even if the devs wanted to, they probably haven’t had the time (or data) to implement any of this.
Hm it’s not even the case with 3rd party apps so indeed I assume it’s the bullshit algorithm.
I heard people complain Reddit removed some reasonable sorting options from the app.
safe to assume with Lemmy that won’t be the case?
That likely wont be the case. Excluding bugs, the methods for Hot, Active, etc. are pretty well defined in the Lemmy documentation (can’t comment on Kbin). And how they’re sorted is identifiable in the source code with enough technical knowledge. If there were any “dark patterns” to drive engagement or make it more Facebook-ified it would be readily apparent from looking through the source. More importantly, I don’t think there’s a strong motive for something like that currently. If certain instances decide to go ad-supported I can see a fork in the frontend source code to support those types of practices happening though.
