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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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The "front page" of lemmy, either the local of the instance you're on or the "all", is pretty bad. Low quality, uninteresting, obscure, sometimes vaguely rude. News about small video games, hyper specific gripes, obscure memes, uninteresting articles with no comments. Compare that to reddit when it was good, which reliably emphasized the biggest world news stories, genuinely interesting user anecdotes or personal stories, academic knowledge (especially AskHistorians), videos or images that grip you, etc. I'm not sure what the issue is with lemmy's front page. Is it an algorithm problem? Something to do with federation? Is the user base merely too small for now and this will improve on its own with more engagement?
It's too bad because the "front page" is the user's first taste of lemmy. Most users will browse without making an account for a while before finally making an account and subscribing to specific communities.
In general, I think lemmy is already great. There are starting to be lots of cool communities, and even if the quantity is lower, the quality seems to be higher.
The front page of Reddit is one of the places I’ve actively avoided. That’s the place where I’ll find everything that the rest of the world likes to see, but none of the stuff that I care about. I tend to be interested in strange niche topics, and my multireddits reflected that quite clearly. To me, the front page of Lemmy is about as boring as the front page of Reddit, so no big changes there.
Yeh for the last few years especially of my using Reddit I would only ever go directly to the 4-5 subs that I frequented. Never once went to the home page/“all”, or the new discover page or whatever it is.
For now I’m using All on here to try and find some communities to join, and which ones to block. I’d say in a few months I’ll just be using Subscribed.
In order to discover interesting places I just went to https://lemmyverse.net/communities and joined every community with an interesting name, such as science, technology, physics etc.
I strongly agree that it needs to improve. Besides the sorting algorithm issues, one issue is that "all" depends on what people on your instance have subscribed to. So small instances might not have much or have a very biased all. I think Lemmy should at least default to basically subscribing to the N biggest communities for all instances, purely to seed the "all" view.
As well, most instances should default to "all", because "local" is usually going to be extremely limited and misleading. Defaulting to local will just make the fediverse look bad. New users aren't going to realize they can switch to all. They'll just think there's barely any content and leave.
Some sorting would be good. I'd also like to be able to hide posts without having to block the poster. Right now there is very little user control.
Lemmy has no algorithm.
That's not really what I was referring to. Sure it selects posts automatically but it's not like it picks what it thinks a specific user is going to click on.
but it is just a simple vote count/time decay, no consideration given to what you have interacted with in the past, ie the "algorithm" on other platforms
That's why the content isn't sorted as well as it could be. There's no one-size-fits-all for social media as people have different things they like.
Yes there is, and it's not that different from reddit. The sorting algorithm is what they refer to. Eg, hot is some balance of time vs votes, which greatly favours newer posts (too new, IMO -- posts it shows will typically no comments or maybe just one or two). Active favours high commenting rates and based on my observations, it seems to drop off around 2 days (too old, IMO -- a considerable number of posts shown by this algorithm seem to be around the 2 day mark). The top and new algorithms are straightforward enough.
All the algorithms favour big communities. There's a "best" algorithm in development, which would try to look at the top for each community and thus give smaller communities a chance. I can't wait for that, because right now, you'll rarely if ever see a small community hit the front page and it sucks bad.
The worldnews thing is the biggest problem right now because the threads just get brigaded so consistently. And lemmy.ml, which has one of the biggest worldnews forums, has a soft ban on the world's biggest ongoing news story.