Before the scaled sort was introduced, the hope was that it would provide a solution to surface posts from smaller communities, without being overrun by memes and political posts from larger communities. However, the scaled sort has been ineffective so far, as most posts appear with a single vote, making it practically the same as the “New” sort.

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!

Although I’ve blocked the largest communities, I still want to see some of that content occasionally.

Do you have any ideas or suggestions on how Lemmy could better surface content from smaller communities?

Edit:

Potential Solutions

Several potential solutions were discussed:

1. Tagging System and Custom Feeds Implementing a tagging system could allow users to create custom feeds by subscribing and blocking specific tags across communities. This could surface niche content by filtering for relevant tags. An incentive system like leaderboards could encourage accurate user tagging.

2. Community Grouping Similar to Reddit’s “Multireddits”, allowing users to group multiple smaller communities together into a single custom feed could boost visibility for those niche communities when browsing that grouped feed.

3. API for Client-Side Sorting Providing an API endpoint that shares metadata for recent posts like post ID, post votes, and comments would allow third-party clients and plugins to experiment with custom sorting algorithms on the front-end tailored to user preferences.

4. “Unanswered” View Having a view that surfaces posts with little or no engagement yet, specifically from smaller communities, could help discover underrepresented niche topics that may need more attention.

5. Server Plugin Architecture If sorting algorithms must be implemented server-side for performance, having a plugin architecture where different instance owners can test out new sorting implementations and formulas could allow faster iteration.

Ideally, a combination of tagging, custom feeds, and improving sort algorithms to factor in community size could provide a multifaceted approach to better surface content from niche communities on Lemmy. Encouraging open discussion around desirable features is valuable to guide development efforts when resources do become available.