I read something the other day that they’re working on a new sorting algorithm that would limit it to the top few posts from each community within a given time frame. Specifically to address this issue.

No idea on timeframe or further details, or if I even summarized it correctly lol.

This has already been mentioned a few times. Just find the relevant issue on GitHub and give it an upvote.

• The rank of a post in the aggregated feed should be inversely proportional to the size of the community #1026
• Weighted Community Subscription for Customized Feed #3518
• Balance Instance Scores Based on Monthly Active Users #3642

Idk it seems like a problem that will sort itself out as Lemmy grows, and artificially limiting how many posts from a community can reach the front page seems like a suboptimal solution that’s going to have unintended consequences down the line.

If a community has grown a lot, unfortunately it takes up all the posts on the homepage. If I were a developer, I would sort by weighted success. For example, if the "x" community has 1000 subscribers and the post gets 100 likes, it has ten percent success. If the other 'y' community has 100 people and gets 11 likes, it has 11 percent success. This overrides the post in community x because the post in community y is more successful. This is the logic of 'weighted success'. With this logic, a better ranking formula can be created.

I generally use “New Comments” as my sorting and it’s a little bit better, but still the same spammy communities end up on top

Another, related issue to this is that I find the three frontpage categories (All/Local/Subscribed) to be too blunt of a sorting method.

I would really love if we had the option to create subcategories to our Subscribed feed, so we could group related communities and end up with different frontpages for News/Sports/Memes etc.

Note that this is one of the advantages of having an account on a smaller and/or more focused instance or having multiple accounts.

All "Alls" are not the same. Actually, the "All" displayed on a given instance is everything local to that instance and everything from other instances to which someone on that instance has subscribed. So if nobody from that instance has subscribed to a particular community on another instance, then for all intents and purposes, it just doesn't exist. Even on "All".

Granted that it's somewhat unlikely for an instance to not have someone somewhere along the way subscribe to some notably popular community, it is possible, and the smaller and more focused the instance is, the more likely it is.

I'd love some kind of per community bias adjustment even for subscribed communities. Like, I don't really want to remove them cause memes are great, but because !memes@lemmy.world and 196 post so often my subscribed feed is pretty dominated by them no matter how I sort it.

For "All" some kind of adjustment based on subscribers makes sense, but I don't even know if that's possible given the way Lemmy works. Maybe a "show me less" button that moves the same bias adjustment just for communities you're not subscribed to?

This was an issue Reddit used to have circa 2015. Front page was all League of Legends posts, and then it was all The_Donald posts. Then Reddit screwed up their algorithm and it was literally 100% The_Donald posts.

I don't know about anyone else's experience, but I've noticed that any time I click into a post view and then back out, I'm taken to the first page of posts, no matter if I was 2 or 3 pages on. If the redirect respected where it came from instead of going to home, that could reduce the impact of post-order sorting. Also if the list pager had more options than 'prev' and 'next' (maybe a few numbered pages between or beyond) I could get beyond that 3rd page without getting there feeling like an illustration of the schlemiel the painter's problem

Fyi the devs aren't reading this (and probably won't be before long, since they are busy just coding a lot of features). Best place to ask for this is on the issue tracker (first check if it hasn't been asked before), even better implement it yourself if you can!

I'm right there with you - I'm making an app called flemmy, and I have 12 more tasks on my list before I'm putting it on the play store - should be this weekend at the latest. Iphone build shouldn't be that far behind. I can also make a desktop build if anyone wants it, but right now have no intentions to host a site myself - I strongly feel the data the app collects shouldn't leave your device

Version 1 is about creating something close to the Reddit apps I used to use, and it's there - just needs a little more polish (and to let you post... I'm more of a commenter, so I forgot that was a thing for an embarrassingly long time)

I can support all sorts of filters, from keywords to hiding specific posts to "snoozing" communities. I can also save your place when you change sort methods or accounts - it's what I always wanted for Reddit.

Also, I have support for redirecting links - Twitter to nitter, YouTube to pipe, etc.

Version 2 is going to focus on your feed. Already I connect to multiple servers (it's a real headache, but the foundation is there), so next is stitching feeds together and custom feed algorithms. What you mention is at the top of my list - a way to tweak the feed based on all sorts of filters.

Ideally, I want it to adapt to you - using upvotes and comments to tweak your feed. All on your phone - it's amazing what you can do on a phone when you're not interested in data collection

I just made !flemmy@Lemmy.world, I'll post some screenshots when I need a longer break

Browse by New. Bam! Problem solved! Stop being slaves of the Algo. Actively search for stuff you like while also actively block those you don't like.

Better solution: don't use Lemmy as your feed, use a feed reader (RSS). There are per-channel feeds that you can sort and filter using parameters.

Doing things this way will also help create the open web we all want to see, where "forum" is not a synonym for "Reddit" or "Lemmy", where you can also follow the goings-on in other places and not miss anything.

yes! yes! yes! I have the same problem.

My suggestion is to add a view with subscriptions ordered by the selected criterion (i.e. new/active/hot/top) and below each community there is vertical list with posts from that community sorted.

This would allow see what's up with the communities we follow and then jump in those communities if we find anything interesting.

A quick, but a little dirty solution for this, would be communities having “tags” in their metadata. This wouldn’t prevent spam, or an accumulation of four trillion tags, but you could easily add “only these tags,” or “not these tags,” to any feed. User objects have metadata that is used like this (as the “bot” flag) already. I’m just familiar enough with the code to know it wouldn’t be a slam dunk, but it’s also not a breaking change or re-write!

I see a wider variety of active topics by sorting All by New Comments.

@dryguy The algorithm needs to be improved. It needs to adjust for the number of boosts/favorites that large communities get. You should be seeing posts from all of the subs you are subscribed too and not just the most popular ones.

I like to use "Hot" instead of active as it seems to fetch posts from a more diverse set of communities

I've also heard that view by new comments is solid as well

I think there should still be a strictly chronological feed that isn't algorithmic, but blocking the bots that import a lot of low quality content from reddit would be easier than blocking the individual subs.

I'm with you 100%. I did find that searching by hot comes out a little better. But I think I'm finally ready to just block the meme and the rule subs.

Also there's just not as much content here as. Reddit. That will eventually change,

Sorting by new works pretty well for me. There's still the couple of them showing up, but there's a lot more variety to what I see that way.