Programming

I think having "Active" as default is unfortunate too, if a new user sees the top post was from two days ago they might assume the whole platform is inactive, since they can't see that a new comment was added just seconds ago from that page view. Having "Hot" as the default would probably be better since those are usually newer posts with at least a few comments.

I don't know a lot about Lemmy's implementation but a difficult thing to deal with is how do you "rank" a post? Like you have a small community of a few active people, but there's federation with a massive community with lots of users - which posts are "better"?

Worse still, there's an inherent lag/delay with the federated posts, a post that was very active in the last hour might have only been federated to the server in the last 5mins - so what do you do, do you bubble up all those posts or ignore it because there's more recent and relevant things?

The kicker is that these decision points aren't instant either, any system that's doing this kind of ranking will have an algorithm as you describe, but that algorithm will take time to process all the data, while the data is coming in batches as each server federates with each other. It's a difficult problem to solve.

My best guess from the way it looks is that Active is like a forum or imageboard sort, where new comments "bump" old threads to the top. Hot appears to be more like "rising", new posts that are interacted with more than others. Both probably make more sense with greater volume, but neither seem perfect for the structure of the site. I would also think "tuning the algorithms" is probably in the "when we get around to it" bucket for most of the people who would be handling that.

Yeah, I'm feeling a bit lost here too. I've been using mostly 'hot' (found this post using it), but there's also the issue with dynamic posts, that suddenly there's a cascade of posts being loaded and you lose where you were on the feed.

I'm on jerboa, and like others are saying "active" is pretty ass and 'hot' is okay. My main actual complaint is the inability to sort comments! Please God, I'm tired of seeing the rare hateful message with 1/2 up votes on top, and then a more normal good comment with 50 up votes beneath it. Going to be a real problem for onboarding people and optics.

Ranking is hard. My biggest gripe with this however, is that the front page doesn't seem to cache my filter/sorting options between page reloads. I've resorted to replacing the anchor href on the logo with my own preferred pre-filtered search result href, via JS injection.

I'm a bit baffled - I love the active sort so far. Sure, it's different from reddit, but in a good way. It means the exact timing of a post, to line up perfectly with the peak active hours of U.S. users, or similar, isn't critical anymore, because a post can go relatively ignored for a day or two and then get picked up and filled with comments and discussion.

It gives people more time to get around to reading a long linked article or watching a linked long video first, before commenting, too, while still leaving them able to participate in discussion after.

It means that people who comment "late" still get replies. Commenting even slightly late on reddit and not getting any replies or votes felt awful, like you were talking to a wall. And the people who sorted by new and commented first tended to stick to the top of threads because they accumulated more upvotes by sheer force of time.

I hope we can avoid re-creating the constant, over-hurried content-churn of reddit, and keep this more patient feel.

That said, I'll concede that active search is best for discussion posts, like on Chat or Gaming (e.g. threads that ask people to share favorite xyz games and so on), or those based around longread articles, and not necessarily as good for Breaking News. But even then... I think it does us good to allow time to discuss news posts, too, and active search does that.

Tldr I use active search as default for everything and I absolutely love it like this, please don't get rid of it just to make the site more like reddit.

Can someone explain why if I choose All/Hot the first page will look "normal" for a bit, but then it starts updating/scrolling constantly? Like I can't keep my place, new items are continuously being added and I can't even finish reading a headline. I don't see any settings to prevent that. What am I doing wrong?

Hopefully the algorithm will improve over time - compared to the site which shall not be mentioned, I find that Hot or Active tend to show the same articles for days (despite there being plenty of newer content). Top Day works well the first time I log in for the day, but then that gets stale too. On the front page I feel like I need more like a "Top Hour" option ... so I can see what is new without the "drinking from the fire hose" that is "new".

These are the early days, Im not unhappy with where we are, I just hope this remains a work in progress and improves.

So I think it's just growing pains of the software still being at a pretty early stage; I agree it's not ideal right now but I'm fairly confident it'll get worked out. That said, there's one option that I'd really like that may not be in the works: I'd like the ability for posts I've seen to get bumped way down in the ranks, so when I refresh the front page it's mostly new stuff. Mostly the reason people go next -> next -> next is from wanting more stuff; it'd be nice if we could cut out the middleman and just show them new stuff.

I always sort by "New Comments". "Active" just gives me the same posts over and over again.

I'd really like to see a "Unread" filter, that shows posts that has not already been up/downvoted or clicked

Biggest problem I think right now is how it auto-appends new posts to the top - browsing /new/ is a simply impossible task. Maybe just tell me there are new posts to fetch and let me refresh when I'm ready? Right now I can't read stuff before it yeets off the bottom of the page

FYI https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html

I'm not sure about the algos, but I'd kill if it would at least remember my choices between page refreshes.

I wish I could change the default comment sorting

Reddit's top hourly was one of my favorite ways to browse. They need to implement that here. Just show me the top posts from the last hour.

A lot of the discussion around sorting specifics makes me wonder if a plugin-like system for user created sorting algorithms would be useful.

It could allow you to curate your own feed in a way, based on age, activity, filters, basically any post metadata. The algorithms could be shared or maybe even federated through lemmy itself. I have a suspicion this would be closer to "neat" than "worth it" though. This is really just a brain dump of a random idea.

My biggest issue is that posts stream in regardless of the sorting option you have picked. So, even if I am sorting by 'hot' posts I'll get a stream of posts that where made less than a minute ago.

I use "Top Day" and seem to be quite happy with it.

Personally I usually sort by "hot", works good for /all, but mixed results on subscribed

I've been doing top of today.

I have the same issue, would love to engage more but sorted feed is either same through out day or bloated