Lemmy is still small and growing, so trying to use your subscribed feed of smaller communities, mixed in with larger communities leaves you with a very uneven feed as your scroll. I like being subscribed to the largest Technology community, but also I am subscribed to the Movies and TV community. One is more active with posts and more comments, and the other is not so much. In this scenario, the current algorithms will always show a feed full of technology posts for pages, and you wont end up seeing Movies and TV until you scroll for a awhile.
I understand that the issues is, “The community isn’t active enough”. Fair. But could prioritizing smaller communities in the algorithm help these small communities become more active then?
If there was way for the subscribed feed to better spread out all of your subscribed communities over your front page, I think this would help smaller communities get more attention. Plus it would be nice to see my smaller communities showing up at the top of my feed. Instead it shows 5 Lemmy Shitposts, 5 Memes and 5 Technology posts, before I see anything else.
Im no programmer, so Im not going to act like I think this would be easy or possible, but I thought id throw this idea out there and maybe it will get some traction.
scaled sort is coming in v0.19.0 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3907
You can already try it using voyager.lemmy.ml
I also noticed you can use sorting methods on the communities list, like sorting them by New https://voyager.lemmy.ml/communities?listingType=All&sort=New&page=1
I agree, if I subscribe to a community that has 2 posts a week, I wanna see those posts, eben if they have no comments. I wonder if a lemmy equivalent to a multireddit could also help? In a multireddit you could group communities into one separate feed (like just create a multireddit “cats” and add all cat related subreddits to this multireddit, and then you could see all cat related content within one feed.
Its not as good a solution as to have the algorithm push it, but maybe there’s a lemmy functionality I’m unaware of that could already emulate this process.
Sort by “hot” kinda does that, but still not enough.