Before the scaled sort was introduced, I had hoped it would provide a solution similar to the “Hot” or “Top” filters but without so many memes and political posts. Unfortunately, the scaled sort seems ineffective as most posts appear with a single vote, making it practically the same as the “New” sort. Although I’ve banned the largest communities, I still want to see some of that content occasionally.
The developers have closed all issues related to the scaled sort, even though it fails to address the issues raised in several discussions:
- Rework “Hot” sorting to show posts from more varied communities
- The rank of a post in the aggregated feed should be inversely proportional to the size of the community
- Is there any way to reverse degrowth of the niche communities on Lemmy?
- I hate to say it but I haven’t been very active on lemmy, but I want to be
Personally, I believe the best way to address this issue is through the implementation of tags and custom feeds. With post tags and custom feeds, users could create separate feeds tailored to their preferences by subscribing to a few communities and blocking specific tags or keywords. However, this would require an incentive system similar to imageboards like Safebooru, with a leaderboard to encourage accurate post tagging by users, as also mentioned in The Great Monkey Tagging Army: How Fake Internet Points Can Save Us All!
Do you have any ideas or suggestions on how Lemmy could better surface content from smaller communities?
Reddit was like this when it started. I was there when Dig was a competitor. It took a decade of constant posts by people who really loved their communities to really take off. And reddit, when it started, didnt have subreddits, it was closer to hackernews.
Not saying your arguments are wrong per-say. But it will take some time to get started. The good news is federation means different instances will come and go but the protocol means we dont need to stay on any one kind of server. Kinda like email. I use mastodon to talk with peertube creators and use lemmy to talk to other lemmy instances all the time.
I think you are spot on here. We need this kind of functionality in order to keep up with instances. For example, lemmy.world/technology and lemmy.ml/technology, etc… could all bu there own multicommunities. Something like /mc/technologies or something saved on a per user perspective. It would transform lemmy overnight I think. multicommunities would make those niche topics have a great deal more action.
Mbin has that. They released a new version 2 weeks ago I’ll have a closer look soon, seems very promising