This sounds like the sort of thing that's best solved with a 'favourite' option that pushes posts from favourited communities to the top of the feed. No need to get in there and over-complicate it with bespoke weightings or anything.
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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I agree that fediverse needs a personalized "explore" page in general. For example, this is the only plus feature of Bluesky over Mastodon (in terms of technology). It is obvious how big difference it makes.
I generally avoid the evil algorithms found on other social networks, but I hope we see that with Lemmy.
Blackbox echo chamber generators really should be avoided. They add to the angst and anger of the Internet, and of society.
Community search could be improved. And people should learn to actually use it, rather than being spoon fed whatever some programmer they've never met thinks they should eat based on the last 3 things they clicked on.
Nah. Algorithms, especially personalized as a way of sorting a feed are just a shite idea. Maybe one of the iOS apps will add something like that but if anything is being different is a selling point. I got two friends on fedi by telling them that "it has no algorithm" which is a simplification of course but you get the gist. It also really hits home that this is not a corporate product.
When do you start counting it as an algoritm.
The current sorts (except new) are based on formulas, does suddenly adding a personal engagement variable into the formula make it an algorithm?
Algorithms are fine when an algorithm is open, clear and optional. The default sort for many apps/UI is "Active", that's an algorithm. It may be a simple one, but it's an algorithm.
No matter which sort you use (except for new),
Yes, sorting by new is best. The rest of the post seems irrelevant.
I wish the web ui (and apps) could work like an old fashioned usenet reader, where it would list your subscribed communities and say how many unread posts each one had. I don't like having all the communities jumbled together. That seems fixable.
The biggest problem with lemmy for me is the multiple "duplicate" communities.
There should be a feature to combine them at the client level. So the 3 different "privacy" communities could just be viewed as one on my lemmy client
A few apps have multi-community support where you can group whatever you want, how you want, in one stream. I'm using Summit, but I feel a few other of the bigger apps support it now. I group the AskLemmys, tv/movie communities and different art communities into groups so I can view by category.
Nah. The different character of the communities and their history makes them unique and special, hiding that for broad appeal is unnecessary.
No need to muddy the waters with weird client-side obfuscations, one big one almost always wins and the other gets reposts, while subscribing to both is trivial if one wishes
Piefed solves this with topics kind of neatly. You keep the unique communities but they are all in one place
The balkanization is a massive problem though because instead of one, active, community we have 3 or 4 dead ones. There needs to be a critical mass of users before communities can afford to start splintering, and that just isn't here.
The "duplicate" communities are housed on different websites. Websites that could very well have their own norms, rules, and culture. Lumping them together and treating them as the same thing is just kind of invasive to them, and promotes bad netiquette.
Just pick one that you like best.
Thats why i said client side view. Each servers community doesnt know i'm viewing 3 communities together on my phone and it doesnt affect them
Yeah, but you are still treating them as subsets of a singular whole.
Don't do that.
Multicommunities would also help with that. News communities would not flood your general feed anymore if you were able to have a specific feed for them
Scaled sort was implemented in 0.19.0, is that not sufficient? https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-12-15_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.0_-_Instance_blocking,_Scaled_sort,_and_Federation_Queue
I mentioned scaled sort in my post. Yes it boosts communities with less activity (in practice this tends to be midsized communities as I mentioned in my post), but it does so generally. What my post is advocating for is a sort that boosts the communities you tend to engage with a lot, not every community that is less active.
Oh, you can also select to see only subscribed communities, and then apply scaled sort. This is my go-to sort after exploring top-6h for a while.
That’s what I do. As I mentioned in the example in my post.
I see you talked about using scaled, but not scaled in conjunction with subscribed. I reread your post and still don't see it. Sorry.