Comment on Six months after the initial reddit surge (graphs)
troyunrau@lemmy.ca 10 months agoOkay, more serious answer. You look like you’re on kbin, so I don’t know if this applies – nevertheless.
On Lemmy 0.19, the Scaled sort algorithm is such a good improvement over (Hot/All/Top/…) that existed prior to 0.19. It’s basically a Hot sort, but it’s weighted by community size. So if you’re subscribed to a small community, that gets one post a week, it’s still likely to end up in your feed. I’ve noticed a huge improvement when switching to it as my default sort – suddenly that weird music community I subbed to, but never noticed any of the posts – is in my feed. Etc.
Lemmy.world is still on 0.18, but when they upgrade (I have no information on that process) I suspect that people should be switching to it as their default sort for a better experience if they’re into niche topics.
That’s cool and all, but sorting is only part of the issue.
The other part is that they’re simply aren’t enough people here yet. That will change with time, of course, I’m not too concerned about that.
Hopefully the sorting will help over time, though.
Decenteralized systems in all it’s glory, but I think at some point we will need to address or come up with a solution on how we market niche communities.
In reddit it was so simple to find your communities. Let’s say you grew interest in Balisongs, then you just type r/balisong and there you are. This helps discovery immensly.
Doing this on a lemmy instance will only get you to that instance community. Which means you might have like 10 of these already niche communities spread out around different instances.
Personally I’d think a system where an instance can promote or assign another instance community as the “main” one, with some type of backup feature, would help Lemmy grow.
But I also think that opinion is controversial considering the nature of a decentralized system.
You can find communities on lemmyverse.net/communities
I know I can.
But my point is that a lot of users will not stay here if they need to jump through different identical-communities across several instances or other websites to build their content-flow.
So you’re saying I should try Hot sort now? Hmm. Let’s see.
I still need to put in the work to sub to all the alternatives. I had hundreds of subs and my front page was so curated. But now on Lemmy, I tried Hot for new/fresh content, but I have to browse Active most of the time due to the amount of just single up vote posts on Hot.
I just wish we had more people. I’m doing my part of being active though!
Even if you find alternatives to all your reddit communities, they might be empty placeholder communities. Someone needs to get the content kicked off in them.
Admittedly it’s not just a lemmy problem. Small reddit subs sometimes have the same issue. My specific field of science is called geophysics. I stopped posting to r/geophysics during the API protest – it was already pretty quiet, and I previously accounted for a significant amount of the content/chatter. But after I stopped posting, what remains is conspiracy theory nonsense mostly. Well, normally I’d report that, but now I’m just watching reddit burn. Started !geophysics@lemmy.ca and it’s just as quiet in there, with mostly me posting… but hey, if I’m going to scream into an empty void, it might as well be here :)
Hey, cool! I didn’t know about Scaled sorting. Thanks again!
Aurelius@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I chatted with the lemmy.world folks about a month or so ago and they mentioned that 0.19 wasn’t fully stable yet. The Lemmy instances being split is a real pain for app developers lol can’t wait till this gets resolved tbh