cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/52386265
Right now, big communities dominate the feed. I’m wondering what sort algorithm could level the field so niche or hobbyist communities have a fair chance to get seen.
There’s a good related post: Niche Communities won’t be able to reach their true potential until Lemmy adds a sort that takes engagement into account. It puts it well:
“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 user’s engagement.”
What do you think should be the default sort for a more balanced Lemmy?
There is no karma-posting on here though. People post a lot because they want their communities to grow. This is the case with /new/ only or /hot/. The habits won’t change.
Remember though that the Fediverse has public voting, so any attempts to game it are often caught and the perpetrators banned. This is very unlike Reddit. Upvoting/downvoting as a system is not perfect, it’s incomplete - and alternative systems could exist, however a react system of some sort is necessary to curate content across the board for the audience.
I mean that if only /new/ existed, then after an hour or so - a small community is invisible unless they keep posting constantly. Because people are unlikely to scroll back and notice posts from that community.
The Fediverse is far too small to even discuss bringing up guards against growth now. In addition, instances can have wildly different - and do have wildly different local policies on community creation, account creation, federation, upvoting (some disable upvotes and downvotes) and many other things if possible. Some instances - as I’m sure you are aware of just don’t get on with each other and their own respective userbases would have different opinions over policy.
I must have missed Rimu saying that recently. I am also on piefed.social. He only communciated that for storage reasons to me in the past.
This is part because the Lemmy software lacks trivial safeguards against day 1 trolls by the way. They can’t even delay community creation for X days for new accounts because Lemmy simply doesn’t have it built in as an option.