Hey, I’m subscribed to a variety of communities in different instances (my “home” instance is lemmy.world) all of them with varying degrees of activity but some nonetheless, when I enter the “subscribed” feed, all is overwhelmingly populated by one community. I guess its because this community is way bigger than the others and it overshadows the post coming from others. As its understandable i would like this feed to be more of a mix of all the c/ that I follow, so i guess my question is, Is there a new sorting algorithm in the works? Is it a feature its being worked on? Or is this by design and it will stay this way? Also, is this something that an instance can change on its own? I know lemmy is open source and that probably the host could change something like this but maybe it breaks the activitypub protocol something, I don’t know.
This is something that happens on reddit too. If you follow a sub that it active but not hugely so their posts will get absolutely buried in the massive flood of bigger subs.
This isn’t really something that can be “solved”. If you follow one sub that gets 1 post every hour and 10 subs that each get 1 post every 6 minutes. This means that for every 1 post in the small sub you get 100 posts from other subs. That’s four pages on reddit to go through to find 1 (!) post.
Say you want the last 5 posts from your tiny sub. Those are going to be spread somewhere through 20 pages. The only way for the software to bring them closer together would be to omit (large) parts of the other content streams. This would mean THAT content gets burried instead.
The solution is to recognize /r/lamaswearingpinkhatstothebeach simply isn’t going to post often enough to show up next to /r/aww and browse them directly.
One possibility would be to auto group streams of similar productivity together so you’d have a “frantic” main feed, a “busy” main feed, a “composed” main feed, a “chill” main feed etc. however many are needed. But you’d still have to deliberately browse each individually.
It can definitely be solved. You can change how you rank posts based on the sub that they are in. So for example instead of sorting simply by
upvotes-downvotesyou can do something like(upvotes-downvotes)/subscribersor(upvotes-downvotes)/average-community-score. Basically this way you are sorting based on how popular each post is for a given community instead of an absolute score.