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?

  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    This is interesting. So sorting is done server-side, I assume this is for performance. In fact now that I think of it, for a client to implement a custom sort it would need to fetch basically every single post for the entire period, across the entire fediverse, which really doesn’t sound practical. At that point the client has effectively become its own local server.

    So that means sorting algorithms need to be implemented server-wide.

    I wonder if this could be done with plugins that servers could experiment with and modify more easily, rather than being baked into full version updates?

    Edit: I have read further down, I understand this is not possible.