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).

    • CmdrShepard@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • HollowNotion@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • Zeth0s@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I blocked meme, shitposting and 196.

        All is nicer now.

        I liked some of the memes but they were too many

        • gkd
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • Anticorp
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        1 year ago

        I blocked that community because it dominated every feed.

      • Wren 🪐
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        1 year ago

        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

      • GnuLinuxDude
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        1 year ago

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

    • whathis@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

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

    • maegul (he/they)
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      1 year ago

      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!

      • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • maegul (he/they)
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          1 year ago

          Personally, I’m not so interested in a single algorithm to cover all bases and give me something that I can doom scroll forever.

          I’m more interested in having the right tools to flexibly explore and consume content as I want, and happy if that means moving through various settings and multiple feeds in a session, so long as it’s user friendly enough to do so.

          At the moment, I think two features will dramatically improve one’s ability to manage the feed. First is this “best” sort being implemented. Second is multi-communities (or multi-subreddits). Either are pretty good on their own. But in combination, they provide quite a lot and I’m honestly not sure what else I’d want.

        • darvit@lemmy.darvit.nl
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          1 year ago

          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
      • tias@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

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

        • bmaxv@noc.social
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          1 year ago

          @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…

    • Vlhacs@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Valmond
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • Interesting_Test_814@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

  • whathis@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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

    • Mythril@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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

      • lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • whathis@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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

        • dm21@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

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

    • omgarm@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • justgohomealready@sh.itjust.works
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      I fixed that by creating an account just for memes on a meme instance, blocking all memes from the serious account, and using Liftoff that allows for easily changing between accounts. I basically have two feeds now, one with only serious stuff and another filled with only memes.

  • Blaze@iusearchlinux.fyi
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    1 year ago

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

  • fearout@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Venator@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      The ranking on hot probably needs to be slightly negatively weighted against the number of subscribers. Or maybe it should sort each community individually, and then show the top post from each community, then the 2nd from each etc. Etc.

    • Lily33@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • fearout@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

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

        • Lily33@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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.

  • sunaurus@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

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

  • mick@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • OldFartPhil@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • mick@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Yes, I know. I was just suggesting a workaround until the weighted algorithm is implemented.

  • paulallen@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I had to unfollow ”politics” because it took over my entire homepage. It’s a bummer because the I like seeing the occasional political post. I’m guessing they drive more engagement and that’s why they’re so ”loud”.

  • GiuseppeAndTheYeti@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • SubsAndDubs@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.