No matter which sort you use (except for new), content is recommended to you by activity. Depending on the sort (active, hot, top) it uses a slightly different mixture of votes/comments/time since post to determine the order.
The only exception is scaled, which boosts a little bit midsized communities, but still doesnāt manage to improve visibility of niche ones.
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 userās engagement.
For example, if I upvote / comment often in a community, there should be an option to have posts from the community be boosted in my feed, even if itās a tiny community.
Letās say Iām subscribed to !world@lemmy.world and !news@lemmy.world because I want to occasionally see news. However, Iām also subscribed to a couple hundred other communities, some of them who donāt manage to get more than a couple upvotes on their biggest posts. And whenever I see them Iām replying/upvoting because Iām passionate about that topic.
My feed shouldnāt be 95% c/news and c/world because those are the most upvoted and commented. I shouldnāt have to scroll down hundreds of posts to find ābigā posts in small communities I interact with at any opportunity I get.
Thatās why I think it would be beneficial to lemmy if the sort/algorithm took into account your engagement in a way.
It doesnāt have to be complicated, you can have a single number āengagement scoreā for every community calculated with a basic formula, and that number is used as a boost to the community.
Iām aware that there are some examples of successful niche communities on lemmy. But thatās mainly because either a significant chunk of the lemmy userbase is into that niche (letās face it the lemmy community is not a representative sample of the world population, we tend to be very similar people), or because the posts on it are simplified image/video type posts which appeal to people who donāt know much about the subject.
I think that Lemmy would benefit from a tag system, one that allows both adding tags to communities but also to posts, the upshot is that these could be handled like hashtags on other federated platforms like Mastodon. Lemmy already does this with posts in a community, but itās just a hashtag of the community name, would be good if users could add their own tags.
Well actuallyā¦ I neglected to mention that PieFed has hashtags already. Hereās an example post showing them. Note the categories at the top and the hashtags below the post. Click them and they seem to work perfectly.
Thatās great, hopefully Lemmy can support something like that soon. I know the devs said following tags is out of the question but I donāt think that means content shouldnāt have tags.
I mean, theoretically I could put hashtags right here and now. #seewhatimean? And if you copied and pasted them into the search bar you could theoretically use them to find other content that also used the same ones. But the whole entire point is to allow the submitter to make their content easier to link up with other content, so that you can simply see something, click it, and instantly find other similar things? Itās really not hard at all, and like PieFed already has it. It sounds like the Lemmy devs simply donāt care about that style, hence it wonāt be done. Unless someone wants to donate their time to make it happen I suppose?
Yeah it would be so posts under those same tags get indexed together. Also probably wouldnāt be worth it to enable it in comments. It would probably be an extra field in the post where you add tags, not just typing a #hashtag.