I’ve noticed that there are a few communities that tend to dominate when viewing all. Some days it gets to where looking at all isn’t very different than just looking at Memes@lemmy.ml or 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone.
Before someone says “you can just block communities you don’t want to see,” it’s not that I never want to see them, it’s that I want to be able to have a view that shows me what is new and popular in a wide variety of communities. I appreciate seeing a few good memes in my feed. The problem is when that’s all I see. Changing the sort from active to hot or top x days doesn’t have much effect on which communities dominate, so that isn’t the solution either.
“You can just subscribe to communities you like”. True, but that has the effect of narrowing what I see. I’d like a view that showed me new things I never thought to subscribe to.
Lemmy devs - if you are reading this - it would be nice to have a feed that limited the number of posts showing up from any particular community. It could be a simple cutoff of 2 or 3 posts, or maybe some sort of weighting function to cause additional posts from the same community to appear lower in the sort order for that feed.
I’d love to hear what devs and other users think about this.
Edit: To everyone saying “just sort be new” - yes, that has its uses, but it only solves part of the problem. I’d like a feed that shows me what is new and popular, but from more than just one or two communities.
Doesn’t Reddit totally weight by size of community tho? Not saying we should just ape the old site but I suspect it’s actually necessary for smaller communities to grow naturally.
I think there are better ways to highlight smaller communities and grow them more organically, like a community dedicated to new and small communities (sorry if I fucked up that link, I’m new here) could highlight a new community each day worthy of our attention. Reddit used to have a subreddit of the day.
Right now the number one thing federated social media needs is just more users. I worry they’ll feel discouraged if they stop seeing the content that gets the most upvotes right now.
I think I’m going to have to disagree with you on that. New communities is fine but as someone who’s been active over there for a while it definitely seems that the issue is that it’s impossible for small communities to get any traction on the main page. I think the most important thing for long term growth is making sure that new users don’t come over here and find that all the communities they are interested in are dead.