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.

  • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    9 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·
      9 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.

      • The_Lemmington_Post@discuss.onlineOPEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        Having shared tags across communities allows for better content discovery and curation based on specific interests or preferences. Users could also easily filter out or avoid posts related to triggering content like their phobias, traumatic events, or other sensitive topics by specifying certain tags they wish to exclude.