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:

  1. Rework “Hot” sorting to show posts from more varied communities
  2. The rank of a post in the aggregated feed should be inversely proportional to the size of the community
  3. Is there any way to reverse degrowth of the niche communities on Lemmy?
  4. 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?

  • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Personally, I believe the best way to address this issue is through the implementation of tags and custom feeds.

    I expressed my enthusiasm for tags over in The Great Monkey Tagging Army discussion and have had a chance to ponder this some more - I still like the idea:

    • It provides context and meaning to posts - just think of all the disambiguation pages on Wikipedia. Are you looking for Predator the film, the UAV, etc? Really only tags can help there - multitags or disambiguation? Or both? There are discussions to be had.
    • It allows more depth to things like communities - I was just talking to someone who had been failing to find a place to talk about a specific British comic until they found !britishcomics@feddit.uk. With tags, I could have tagged the community with #dandy, #beano, #2000AD, #bunty, etc.
    • It also provides a way for Lemmy to integrate better with the Fediverse as it doesn’t currently play well with services outside the Threadiverse.

    My current thinking is leaning towards FediTags - a separate, federated plug-in service. So you could run it with Lemmy, Pixelfed, etc and it would bring together all the tagged content. You look up stonehenge + photographs and get pictures on Pixelfed, Mastodon and kbin. As a plug-in the changes in code needed to, for example, Lemmy would be minimal and, hopefully, a one-time thing. Development of FediTag could then take place completely separately.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      Tagging would make sense to categorize posts within a single community. But you seem to suggest tags which are shared across communities. I dont really see the point of this, as communities themselves are already used for a global “tagging” of posts. So it would only duplicate that functionality.