Fediverse

When someone creates a new discussion in a merged community, which servers would it be posted to? All? Of only one of them, wouldn't it be confusing for the user to suddenly have to choose? What if the component communities have different moderation policies?

Ok but that's about the problem of redundancy in the threadiverse. That's a different discussion.

Mmh ... why call it weight? You probably still want to sum it up to 100, right? So why not just call it probability right away?

Then if I see too much from worldnews, I can scale it down to 50 and see half as much from that community in my feed. The goal being that I can adjust the proportions of different contents types without blocking users or unsubscribing entirely.

That's basically a fully custumizable feed, right? Yeah, that would also be cool. Altough maybe a bit of over-engineering - don't now if it would be that useful to the average user.

Edit: I think this also addresses the problem that smaller communities don't appear as often between very active communities. I think this should be solved with a better sorting algorithm (already tried to fix here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3907). But in part, this also needs to be fixed by the community, because discussion quality in some communities isn't what it could be. This will probably change over time and then, for the average user, I think it will be enough to unsubscribe. I still think weights are a bit too much.

No it doesn't. It addresses a different problem, namely: posts from small instances should be somehow boosted in my feed.

The problem I try to address is regarding posts from my local instance vs. posts from all federated instances. I would like to have a sorting that gives up a good mix here and that would also be in line with admin's motivations to keep their instances alive. As described here: https://lemmy.world/post/5110168 their chose to promote the All/Explore or the Local feed can be modeled with problem from game theory and can result in admins to choosing to promote only the local feed if they find that the All-feed gives their posts a disadvantage and over long, drains away their user engagement. Scaled sort will not be able to fix that.

(Actually should have written that in the description)

I just called it Explore because its called that in Mastodon. Mixed is also fine.

To include Local, you could also make a slider with two slide-poitns:

Local All Subscribed

==()===========()==

Mostly agree, except many people are fed-up with algorithms, so giving a manual option helps with that.

There’s already an algorithm. The difference between an algorithm on Lemmy and Reddit is that the algorithm on Lemmy is public.

Meaning that it will store your preference in a per user file and learn from your behavior. Tracking your every like and every comment, measuring every word you posted against every tagged key words available and serving you the most probable posts that matches the most with your profile.

And of course this would be open to the public given the nature of the fediverse. And then advertisers would just waltz in and pluck it from the records.

You have that on every other platform.

Yes, because for smaller communities, the All-Feed would still mean that they aren't present there. They would still chose the local-feed.

It would also be nice for people who chose their instances for a reason and want them to give them a bit more attention than other instances but don't want to switch back and worth between All and Local. I think there are many of that.

Thanks for your effort, especially the example screenshot! Your presentation with colors showcases the idea very well!

It's not clear where the numeric preferences (e.g. 10/40/50) should be defined. Is it in user settings? Or should it be right next to the Subscribed/Explore/Local/All toggle? And is it a digit input field, or a graphical control like sliders? Anyways, details.

I'd also like the option to always show new posts or posts with new comments from favorited communities. This could help small communities and their subscribers to get things going.

Or well, we can implement both ideas with the same mechanic: Allow me to override the likelihood with which a post from a specific community shows up in my feed. This way, I can include both big and active communities in which I'm only mildly interested, and small and rarely active communities in which I'm very interested in the same feed.