No matter which sort you use (except for new), content is recommended to you by activity. Depending on the sort (active, hot, top) it uses a slightly different mixture of votes/comments/time since post to determine the order.
The only exception is scaled, which boosts a little bit midsized communities, but still doesnāt manage to improve visibility of niche ones.
If lemmy is to truly start having active hobbyist communities instead of being 95% lefty US politics, Shitposts, and some tech stuff, it needs a sort that takes into account the userās engagement.
For example, if I upvote / comment often in a community, there should be an option to have posts from the community be boosted in my feed, even if itās a tiny community.
Letās say Iām subscribed to [email protected] and [email protected] because I want to occasionally see news. However, Iām also subscribed to a couple hundred other communities, some of them who donāt manage to get more than a couple upvotes on their biggest posts. And whenever I see them Iām replying/upvoting because Iām passionate about that topic.
My feed shouldnāt be 95% c/news and c/world because those are the most upvoted and commented. I shouldnāt have to scroll down hundreds of posts to find ābigā posts in small communities I interact with at any opportunity I get.
Thatās why I think it would be beneficial to lemmy if the sort/algorithm took into account your engagement in a way.
It doesnāt have to be complicated, you can have a single number āengagement scoreā for every community calculated with a basic formula, and that number is used as a boost to the community.
Iām aware that there are some examples of successful niche communities on lemmy. But thatās mainly because either a significant chunk of the lemmy userbase is into that niche (letās face it the lemmy community is not a representative sample of the world population, we tend to be very similar people), or because the posts on it are simplified image/video type posts which appeal to people who donāt know much about the subject.
My solution to this (same experience here), was to block all the communities that were flooding with this stuff and anything else I didnāt care for, and then just browse All. Now my home feed is pretty nice.
Leftist into tech.
My feed got very overwhelmed by depressing relatable memes that, guess what, had leftist views expressed in the comments, and posts that were not politics but ended up getting into there anyways.
I might be leftist but damn if outrage and despair isnāt exhausting, I come to social media for fun, not to be angry and sad and hopeless.
Gave up on All incredibly quickly, only use Subscribed (I explicitly excluded anything political from Subscribed). So much less outrage and despair, so many more cute animals.
You can still use All, if you block the communities that you donāt want to see, one by one. Itās exhausting and new ones continue to be added, but otherwise itās hard to know about new communities that come along that you might like.
So like I blocked [email protected] bc of its constant (seemingly not-entirely-joking) call for guillotining irl people including average people who simply were born in a capitalist nation, but subscribed to [email protected] that I enjoy much more now - the latter created only a few days ago, check it out!:-)
Also [email protected]. Really you miss so much only browsing by Subscribed. But do what works for you, bc I get it: the amount of extremist content on Lemmy is extremely high, and as you say depressing in its consistency.
Yes, this was pretty much the same way I thought about it since I want know about new, interesting communities and hope that eventually the smaller ones will thrive like they did on Reddit. Honestly, I didnāt even think it was that exhausting. I would browse the home feed and as soon as I saw a stupid post that seemed to be typical of a particular community, I would click directly on the community link from the home feed and then click block this community. The nice thing about doing it this way is that you tend to quickly get rid of the worst offending communities which has the most significant impact on your timeline. After that, it was more of an occasional block for me.
Yup, same. Though youāll still miss the extremely niche ones that way - e.g. I had an account on discuss.online and noticed the community [email protected] mentioned in the sidebar featured area. To this day my post offered there remains the single one - even the creator didnāt bother making one, probably just squatting the name.
And I noticed [email protected] by the creator making a post announcing having created it.
I think browsing by All is helpful but by the time you find good communities there they have already taken off enough to be noticed.
Which is why I really enjoyed browsing by New often - you get the bleeding edge stuff that perhaps few people will ever see or upvote:-). But you also get a LOT of e.g. anime posts that way too, as new communities for them kept popping up.:-P
Good tip about browsing by New. I donāt do that very often, and I donāt think I have since I blocked a bunch of communities. Iāll try it again, thanks!
I realize my wording āGave up on Allā probably came off as if I wanted to use it and was disappointed I couldnāt, so I appreciate you trying to give me advice on how I could still use it. Iām happy doing things this way though. I find Subscribed far easier to use than playing whack-a-mole with the many, many meme communities that inevitably have a āhaha the world SUCKSā post, and then understandable but still-not-good-for-me-personally vents about the world sucking in the comments. Or news communities (not just politics!) that inevitably post something that could tie into politics, and then all the politics in the comments. You said itās exhausting yourself, and I simply donāt have the energy to put quite that much effort into it. If you find it worth it anyways, more power to you, but I really donāt mind missing out on something I might like in exchange for missing out on 1) stuff I really donāt like and 2) a lot of stuff Iām ambivalent about and would rather just scroll past.
I do look at [email protected], which is good enough for me in my opinion re: discovering new stuff, and although this isnāt really the purpose of [email protected], it often tells me about communities I didnāt know about. And sometimes I click Communities on an instance and wander through the list.
Ah, this is indeed the main thing:-).
Fwiw, it also helps to block people. I mean, that sounds obvious, but in a couple cases I started to notice how I may not need to block an entire community since I could get the same effect by blocking the user - plus also not see their posts in other communities as well. Or maybe Iām deluding myself and perhaps I later went on to block the entire community. Some really do just have so many trash articles that itās not worth getting upset about each one individually so much as simply moving onwards to better ones:-).