How would I add a new ranking algorithm to Lemmy as a contributor? I’m a developer by trade, but unfamiliar with Rust and the codebase of Lemmy specifically. It doesn’t seem like Lemmy has a concept of ‘ranking plugins’, so whatever I do would have to involve an MR.

Specifically, I’d like to introduce a ranking system that approximates Proportional Approval Voting, specifically using Thiele’s elimination methods, like is used in LiquidFeedback.

I’m pretty sure that with a few tweaks to Thiele’s rules, I can compute a complete ranking of all comments in a thread in O(ClogC + E + VlogC), where C is the number of comments, E is the total number of likes, and V is the number of users. This would also support partial approvals, upvotes could decay with age.

I believe this would mitigate the tendency towards echo chambers that Lemmy inherits from Reddit. Lemmy effectively uses Block Approval Voting with decays to rank comments and posts, leading to the same people dominating every conversation.

  • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
    2·
    17 hours ago

    so I could have a frontend that scraped every comment and then every like of every comment in a community

    Or you could do the same thing that https://lemvotes.org/ does and follow the communities and actors to build this database on a separate server, which then can be used by the client(s).