I’m not really sure where to ask this question. Maybe there’s a lemmy dev community where these kind of discussions already happen.

I feel like the default front page in Lemmy is still severely lacking when compared to Reddit’s r/all algorithm. I find hot and top hourly to be nearly identical. The top 6 hour is closer, but still not as good as what the Reddit default front page is.

75 points

Yeah same. People complain about algorithms but 80% of the posts on my homescreen are posts from the meme pages. There should be a choice for algorithm based feed.

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63 points

I don’t think people realize what an “algorithm” actually is. Top hourly is an algorithm, for instance.

The advantage of being open source is that all the algorithm logic is accessible by anybody. So they can’t hide nefarious logic in there to push agendas for instance.

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26 points

I feel that the mention of reddit’s ‘r/all’ algorithm being better than Lemmy’s algorithm certainly shows a clear misunderstanding of these algorithms; r/all can be sorted in the exact same ways as Lemmy, the only difference is that reddit has more active users and thereby more content + people filtering it by voting. I also think people in this thread misunderstand ‘algorithm’ to mean something solely meant to find posts that they may personally like or at least the least are somehow quasi-objectively ‘good’. An algorithm for that can be made, but that is not what the algorithms currently in-use have ever been intended to do.

If someone wants a feed of posts that particularly targets their interests then they’ll have to tailor one themselves, just like on reddit.

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10 points

What I really miss from reddit is multireddits, something that Lemmy could seriously benefit from when there are multiple competing communities on different instances focusing on the same topics. I really hope some version of that is on the roadmap.

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10 points

I don’t know how well lemmy sorts by “level of interaction relative to number of subscribers”. For instance on r/all, you’d see a post with 15 upvotes on r/really-specific-thing-from-the-town-i-live-in-with-500-subs right next to a r/askreddit thread with 30k upvotes. In order to see smaller communities, it seems like I have to be on new or hot, but it never seems to make its way up to active.

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3 points

So, when I go to r/all, it defaults to “hot”. That sorting algorithm is specifically what I’m referring to. And no, that doesn’t exist in Lemmy. Top 6 hours is the closest that I can get to that, but I believe there is tons of logic hidden in the Reddit algorithm that makes the quality of sorting better.

I am not looking for a personalized sorting option. I browsed r/all specifically to avoid that. The front page of r/all always felt special to me. Like content that makes the front page is a big deal on Reddit.

I get that the quality of content isn’t there yet and depends on a larger user base. I just want to know that the front page sorting is being worked on, and maybe what the conversation looks like.

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2 points

The one advantage that Reddit’s r/all has over the lemmy “all” is that it blocked posts from porn subreddits (and a few other controversial ones).

I’d like to browse all more often since there are so many communities to discover, especially now while new ones are constantly being created. But I won’t do that in public due to all the porn in the feed. Hiding nsfw posts doesn’t really solve the problem since there are plenty of non-pornographic nsfw posts I’d like to see.

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1 point

This is true, but that doesn’t mean that the implementation your instance is using is exactly the same as what’s in the main lemmy code stack.

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19 points

I blocked so many communities because it’s almost just an endless stream of memes

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12 points

Same. I like memes but when people are just shotgunning every single meme from the last 20 years it gets a little old.

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3 points

I subscribed to all non-meme communities and just browse by Subscribed.

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2 points

Same. If I want memes, I just browse all.

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-9 points

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5 points

Why not look at new in subscribed, rather than all? - or are you subscribed to memes communities?

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4 points

I’m tired of blocking memes. Multiple instances and multiple communities.

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3 points

Same, and a few days ago I had memes on the front page from 2h ago and some from 2 years ago?!?

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1 point

I am a pretty big fan of new comments as a default sort. Occasionally days old stuff will reappear if comments start up again but mostly it’s new stuff generating discussion.

Top day or 12 hours for a rough daily digest.

And new for well…new.

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24 points

I sort by new. It seems to work. There’s a severe lack of comments, which I am trying to do my part to rectify.

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7 points
*

Also when sorting by “hot” I see posts without any comments. Always been a lurker in Reddit, here i’m trying to make my best to comment whenever I have something “intelligent/funny” to say (Rarely but still… :D ).

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4 points

I think some of these posts actually have comments, they just aren’t loading or showing up on the instance for whatever reason.

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2 points

Well that would explain it

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4 points

I like top by 6 or 12 hours. Usually a pretty good mix of everything until something better comes up. Still tons of memes, but seeing more and more tech/pics/news/politics posts with it.

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3 points
*

Yeah that’s something I’m noticing a lot too. It feels like, at the moment, a lot of the communities are communities in name only. People upvote posts when they see them but there’s not much discussion happening.

Which is something that will improve with time, obviously.

I could go into all those common threads and start making comments but I feel like it would just be inorganic.

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2 points
*

One thing that I try to do is find other comments and respond to them. A lot of times it’s easier to respond to another comment than to make a top level comment in the post, imo. And it opens up the door to a discussion, which is the whole purpose of this platform

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0 points

!League@lemmy.ml I’ve been doing my best, but it’s mostly talking to myself.

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20 points

I’ve found “hot” to be really unusable.

Just yesterday I was still getting posts from over a year ago with zero comments every 6-7 posts as I scroll down.

I’ve had to just go use “top - last 6 hours” to actually find newer posts with comments with active discussions.

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5 points

Yup, top for the last 6 or 12 hours is the best way to replicate the “front page” algorithm most people are accustomed to.

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16 points

There’s a PR open for a better sort algo, so once everything is working well with it, then yes.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3378

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11 points

Lemmy has like a million users, Reddit has closer to two billion monthly active users. It’s going to be a long time before Lemmy’s homepage has the same activity as Reddit’s.

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16 points

2 billion seems kind of high. That is like a fifth of the planets population as active users. I don’t think they even have 2 billion registered accounts including duplicates.

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5 points
*

A lot of sites state Reddit has 1.6B monthly active users, but really that number is monthly site visits. From what I can find it’s more like 400M monthly active users.

Reddit is still a behemoth compared to Lemmy, which has 1.5M accounts but only 70k active users last month.

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1 point
*

I pulled that number from their corporate advertising report, so it’s likely inflated. The number was 1.6 billion and I rounded up. My guess is that it’s 1.6 billion impressions, not unique visitors.

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1 point

Bots are inflating that number significantly.

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-1 points

I think reddit is around 50 million daily, 500 million monthly active users. The good news is that the vast majority of those users contribute nothing of value.

It’s going to take time but there is no alternative, we just need to build Lemmy up one day at a time.

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2 points

I recognize this as well. Mostly I want to know that discussions are being had about a front page sort, and what those discussions might be like.

Even without the Reddit user count, I think the sorting should be better.

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1 point

My only complaint is that it keeps showing me stuff I’ve already seen, even though I have “show read posts” toggled to off.

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2 points

Is that a feature of an app? Or built into Lemmy? I use Memmy, and that is a feature in there.

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1 point

So one in four people, on earth, are redditors? Come on man.

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1 point

I’m just quoting Reddit. I already said elsewhere that I doubt that’s an accurate number. It’s probably total impressions or something.

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