this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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Hot and Active feeds pull in a lot of things that are up to 2 days old, but by 12-24 hours at the most, nearly all conversation is done. It's not nearly as rewarding to interact with posts on those feeds when so few people are even looking at them.
If everyone saw the same feeds, that might be something because maybe the conversation would continue, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case due to federation.
Its been a focus of mine to try to make lemmy's comment sorting the opposite of the reddit experience, where the highest rated comment is nearly always just the first one, making all engagement after those first few minutes pointless.
The active sort does a good job of bumping new activity on older posts (limited to 2 days) back to the top. There's also a
New Commentssort that doesn't have that 2-day limit (making it basically a forum sort), but I don't know how many people use it.Not sure what else we could do tho, the main problem is probably just the smaller number of users. Which needs to be tackled by convincing reddit communities and their mods to move them over to some lemmy instance.
More on lemmy's ranking algorithm here..
This is a great comment, thank you. Very good links.
Do you know how federation affects the sorts? I assume, based on my longer experience with Mastodon, that the All feed is actually just all of the posts that have been federated to my instance i.e. someone on my instance is subscribed to that community. So any communities no one on my server is subscribed to are invisible regardless of sort.
That implies the All feed is unique to each server, and therefore all of the sorts are also unique. Which would mean for at least a certain percentage of posts, they might be in your hot or active feeds, even though no one is really interacting with them much any more.
What do you think? Maybe it doesn't work as much like Mastodon as I think, but since it's all the same fediverse it feels like a logical assumption.
Put simply, the sorting / ranking is based on the score and the time published, so as long as things are getting federated within a few seconds, then federated posts / comments are no different from local ones. Mastodon only sorts things by newest AFAIK.
Should only be an issue if your server blocks other ones.
So is the All feed actually all communities and not just ones federated to your instance by virtue of someone on the instance subscribing? That was really the crux of my question.
Ah, this is completely different and has nothing to do with sorting.
Allmeans the latter, IE communities connected to your instance, that your instance knows about. Lemmy doesn't crawl anything, federated communities need to get subscribed to first, then posts can start coming in for them.Yes but also no. Because if the contents of All are unique to each server, that has some implications for which posts appear in the various sorts, right? Maybe I'm overthinking and the effect is minute, but I feel like in at least some cases it would mean less active posts could squeeze out more active posts.
Its best to just think of them as separate to keep it clear. Sorting affects all posts (federated or not) in the same way.
Alright. I appreciate the conversation. I feel like I'm not getting my point across, but that's cool. I'm not going to keep bugging you. Thanks again!
I think your strategy for going the opposite than reddit works quite well when it comes to comments. However, I don't think it fits so well with posts (not sure if the strategy/sorting for posts and comments use the same methods). Personally I don't feel great seeing posts older than 24 hours, especially as I have probably already seen that post. It'll just stick around for way too long.
The Hot and Scaled sort shouldn't be showing anything that old, try changing your default post sort to that for a bit.
Active will do what you're saying tho, keep bumping things.
Could there be a one-click way to automatically 'import' a Reddit subreddit over to a Lemmy community? Meaning, create it, import the sidebars, welcomes, rules, graphics, etc. so it looks familiar to regular users. If not, at least a step-by-step tutorial on how mods could do it.
Another option would be to provide something like a crossposting Chrome or Firefox extension that lets people simultaneously post content to both Reddit and Lemmy. Give them a smooth transition path.
Lastly, the Bluesky concept of 'pluggable algorithms' is one way to make it so users can choose whatever sort works best for their interests.
There are a few import tools written to import historical posts, which is the main difficulty. Copying and pasting a sidebar markdown, re-uploading images would take a max of like 10 minutes.
I intentionally kept historical imports out, since Reddit is blocking APIs under the guise of limiting AI scraping.
My main point was setting up an easier way for low-tech mods to set up a parallel community, then nudge users to move over.
I agree with Dessalines that moving the sidebar takes 10 minutes.
Feel free to join [email protected] if you want to discuss how to grow communities
Reddit's mod interface isn't an easy one to use, so they'd probably have an easier time over here. If they can click an upload image button, and copy paste, they should be okay.
I prefer using the "scaled" feed rather than "active". It's like active, but boosts posts from smaller communities, and seems to usually surface newer content.
that's why i've switched to "new"