Deebster

Thanks, I knew I'd seen it before somewhere.

Nothing dates it more than the reference to Boing Boing.

Then the UK's equally dumb: it was 10:04 pm BST (GMT+1) cos daylight savings is a thing in most of Europe too. At least it's synchronised across Europe^[The EU is planning on killing daylight savings but I have no idea if the UK will do the sensible thing and go along when/if this happens] so you just need to remember that most^[thanks for making it more confusing, Mexico] of North America changes a few weeks earlier.

Also, the UK says GMT/BST which is nice and clear - calling both EST and EDT "Eastern Time" makes even more of a mess!

And yes, I've just rediscovered you can use footnotes, why do you ask?

The duplicate content thing is kinda impossible to solve perfectly. Some people will tell you it's a feature, and it can be interesting to see the different instances' comment sections (especially after moderation), but yeah it can be annoying to have your feed dominated by a few stories.

The default web front-end will merge crossposts, but won't if they're multiple posts to the same URL. I think some of the apps do have that deduplication as a feature, but I couldn't tell you which.

I remember the same problem from my Reddit days, but there wasn't generally so many similar, overlapping communities.

From the Lemmy docs:

• Active (default): Calculates a rank based on the score and time of the latest comment, with decay over time
• Hot: Like active, but uses time when the post was published

My default is set to

• Scaled: Like hot, but gives a boost to less active communities

This is the newest sorting option, I think, and it helps me not miss posts from the smaller comms - particularly ones where people are asking a question and there's been no engagement. Ideally I'd like to have Mastodon-style lists so I could have "quiet comms" or something and check them all every so often.

I will switch to new or top 6h/24h if I've been on recently and just want to see what's fresh. Top all time or 1y if I'm looking at new-to-me comms so I can see what type of thing to expect from it.

There's no algorithm here*, so use the different sorting options (for both posts and comments), as well as setting your favourite as default once you see what works for you.

* the different sort options are of course algorithms, but I mean there's no automatic, manipulative system like YouTube's "The Algorithm", Facebook, TikTok, etc.

Voting doesn't tune your algorithm, so I'd say only use downvoting for things that are low quality, trolling, in the wrong sub, duplicate posts, etc. Your votes aren't private, by the way - although Lemmy itself doesn't display voters' names, that info is in every server's database, and some other software in the Fediverse does show them.

There are quite a few apps available, I like Voyager on Android and I stick to the default website on my computer.

Also these can be good sources:

• !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
• !new_communities@mander.xyz

I think scaled is better than hot otherwise you'll never see anything from your small communities.

Sometimes I get downvotes that make no sense, so I just chose to believe it was an accident.

btw, you've typoed the name: altwiki makes me think it's an alt-right version of Wikipedia.

I don't think people should downvote this Linux-related content that's in a Linux sub just because it's been posted on different servers in the Fediverse. People are too free with their downvotes.

Oof, that's embarrassing for a "hacker" distro. I guess they have too many red teamers and no blue.