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cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/52386265

Right now, big communities dominate the feed. I’m wondering what sort algorithm could level the field so niche or hobbyist communities have a fair chance to get seen.

There’s a good related post: Niche Communities won't be able to reach their true potential until Lemmy adds a sort that takes engagement into account. It puts it well:

“If Lemmy is to truly start having active hobbyist communities instead of being 95% lefty US politics, Shitposts, and some tech stuff, it needs a sort that takes into account the user’s engagement.”

What do you think should be the default sort for a more balanced Lemmy?

all 44 comments
sorted by: hot top new old
[-] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 60 points 10 months ago

Try "Scaled," it is better.

[-] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I've just tried it out on "All" and basically the entire first page is filled with one user's posts to !visualarts@lemmy.dbzer0.com :/

[-] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 11 points 10 months ago

Hm

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&sort=Scaled

Yeah, maybe so. I think you may have to do it to "Subscribed" only, and then sometimes cut out one specific community or other that it is over-promoting. I mean, it's doing what it's supposed to do, promoting small communities, but I think sometimes it maybe gets carried away.

[-] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 12 points 10 months ago

Maybe the size of the community should be determined based on posts per month instead of the number of active users

[-] MHLoppy@fedia.io 7 points 10 months ago

Imo that's as much a problem of the sorting algorithm as it is with a single community blasting out too many posts at once without any consideration for how current frontends are unable to usefully integrate that into people's feeds. A couple of years ago nanoUFO was being a bit (subjectively) overenthusiastic about posting - I counted and !games@sh.itjust.works had 40 posts at once from them and it made the first couple pages of my feed basically unusable for a while.

Scaled is also probably better suited for your subscribed feed rather than /All.

[-] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 11 points 10 months ago

Scaled with Subscribed, then liberally subscribe to any and all communities I think I might be interested in. Check the Scaled + All firehose once in a while and subscribe to new communities if anything new shows up.

[-] cerement@slrpnk.net 26 points 10 months ago

TIL: there are people who don’t sort by “New”

[-] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 21 points 10 months ago

That would cause me to miss many interesting threads that were created at a time when I happened not to be looking at Lemmy.

"New comments" it is for me, that causes threads to get bumped to the top as long as other people still find them interesting.

[-] HappyFrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 10 months ago

Yeah, I almost always sort by bew, then I check once a week using top to see if I missed anything.

[-] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 2 points 10 months ago

This is the way, and for comments added on posts

[-] Nemo@slrpnk.net 12 points 10 months ago

It's not a competition. Get rid of that mindset.

[-] Chozo@fedia.io 14 points 10 months ago

It's not necessarily about competition, it's about visibility. If I create something and I want to share it with people, that means I want people to see it. It doesn't necessarily mean "I want people to see this more than other posts", just "I'd rather not be posting into the void".

For instance, I make YouTube Shorts for a game I play. I don't post them on Lemmy anymore, because the Lemmy community for the game only has 60 subscribers, most of whom aren't even active accounts anymore. The highest-upvoted thread in the community has 47 votes, the second-highest only has 9. This translates to effectively nobody on Lemmy seeing the videos I made, because this small, slow-paced community's posts get drowned out by everything else.

[-] Skavau@piefed.social 3 points 10 months ago

What's the game? I feel like a broader community for "YouTube Shorts for a games people play" would have more successful than a community tailored to that specific game.

[-] PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com -3 points 10 months ago

I think it is, and niche has lost to shitposting. Also, don't tell me what to do.

[-] PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com 12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)
  1. Compute raw post score (upvotes minus downvotes).
  2. Normalize score by community size (e.g., divide by square root of active users).
  3. Calculate z-score relative to community mean and standard deviation.
  4. Apply time decay to prioritize recent posts.
  5. Sort posts by adjusted z-score.
  • Outcome: Posts that significantly outperform their community norm appear prominently, giving small and large communities equal visibility potential.
  • Enhancements: Minimum engagement thresholds, Bayesian shrinkage for small communities.
[-] trajekolus@piefed.social 15 points 10 months ago

I'm not sure how Scaled is determined, but as far as I know, it is made for what you want

[-] PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com 12 points 10 months ago

Nah it only rewards communities with few members, that means bot communities with lot of posts and almost no active users are always going to be top. That's not the outliers sorting that I want.

[-] rimu@piefed.social 5 points 10 months ago

That's an interesting algorithm!

IMO the Lemmy scaled sort would be ok if it wasn't as powerful.

Try the scaled sort on PieFed.social, the amplification isn't as strong and I just tweaked it to filter out bot posts.

https://piefed.social/home/scaled/all

[-] Jayjader@jlai.lu 11 points 10 months ago

"Top over the last 6 hours" can be a decent middle ground between "new", "scaled", and "active".

[-] OpenStars@piefed.social 8 points 10 months ago

I tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried with Lemmy. The best I found that I could hope for was sorting by New, but mostly I just gave up hope for it.

Until I moved to PieFed, and now the issue has multiple solutions. For one, using the Topic/Feeds (which are user-customizeable and shareable) you really can have your cake and eat it too, e.g. you can unsubscribe from all politics communities so that those do not show up on your main homepage, but an entire new feed completely dedicated to News & Politics is just a click away. Or Memes. Or Hobbies. Or Movies & TV, or any of a thousand other things - again, you can build your own, or subscribe to one that someone else has made.

And for another, for sufficiently low-traffic communities you can click the bell icon (which you can do to pretty much anything - users, posts, comments, communities, etc. - plus you can even UNCLICK that to silence notifications from your own content!!), so that you get a notification for each and every single new post to it. But, if it ever does get to be too much, you can mark all as read and/or separate the different categories of notifications from one another - community posts by others vs. replies to your own content.

PieFed really is leaving Lemmy behind in the dust, as far as features are concerned.

[-] mrdown@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

I think crossposting from time to time may help

[-] mesamunefire@piefed.social 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Maybe search by tags? I know piefed allows you to do that. And Mastodon.

Either that or make your own search via api and exclude any community with more than X subscribers. Probably would work well.

[-] PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com 1 points 10 months ago

I'm fine just using the hot sort or scaled sort in my subscribed communities. I don't participate much since I mainly post in niche communities, and Lemmy tends to smother those, so I have to keep using Reddit.

[-] other_cat@piefed.zip 3 points 10 months ago

I do Top Day for my subscribed communities, and then when I get through that, I switch to All and Active and I've found quite a few interesting posts and communities that way.

[-] podbrushkin@mander.xyz 3 points 10 months ago

Instead of small communities we have a billion posts per second about Trump and Charlie Kirk. It’s not possible to hide them, filtered keywords feature doesn’t work for pictures. Also, have you seen latest anti-MAGA meme? It’s fire, go check it out, just switch your feed to Global.

[-] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 10 months ago

Most pictures though have titles that should filter them out via keywords

[-] podbrushkin@mander.xyz 2 points 10 months ago

Nah, it’s like brooming in the forest. If only keywords worked for pictures… (in pic next post is about trump btw)

[-] penguin202124@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago

New comments ftw

[-] BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It's Lemmy. They're all small communities...

[-] Inaminate_Carbon_Rod@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

I’d love to see more action in the Magic the Gathering communities.

[-] Tracaine@lemmy.world -1 points 10 months ago

Compete with what? Maybe the small communities should just not suck.

[-] trajekolus@piefed.social 11 points 10 months ago

Seriously?
A lot of small communities are small because they are niche or because they are new

[-] Chozo@fedia.io 3 points 10 months ago

It's a signal-to-noise issue. There are some smaller communities I'd like to keep an eye on, but the posts from those communities get drowned out by the more active ones. I miss a lot of posts that I would have liked to have seen because of this.

this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
128 points (97.1% liked)

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