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?
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.