• 0 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 10th, 2023

help-circle





  • It certainly doesn’t help that Lemmy had and still has absolutely no sensible way to actually surface niche communities to its subscribers. Unlike Reddit, it doesn’t weigh posts by their relative popularity within the community but only by total popularity/popularity within the instance. There’s also zero form of community grouping (like Reddit’s multireddits) - all of which effectively eliminates all niche communities from any sensible main view mode and floods those with shitty memes and even shittier politics only. This pretty much suffocated the initially enthusiastic niche tech communities I had subscribed to. They stood no chance to thrive and their untimely death was inevitable.

    There are some very tepid attempts to remedy this in upcoming Lemmy builds, but I fear it’s too little too late.

    I fear that Lemmy was simply nowhere near mature enough when it mattered and it has been slowly bleeding users and content ever since. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, though.



  • Same here. One of the biggest issues is that Lemmy is currently terrible at surfacing content from niche communities: no weighted activity, no “multi-reddit-syle” community grouping - pretty much any main view mode is dominated by a few large communities only. This makes the death of the small communities a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    The next version of Lemmy is making some very tepid improvements in that regard, but it’s nowhere near enough.



  • A new scaled sort option has been added. This sort is identical to the Hot sort, but also takes into account the number of each community’s active monthly users, and so helps to boost posts from less active communities to the top.

    This is such a vital change and should be the default. Lemmy is currently effectively suffocating and killing its small communities and stunting its own growth due to its complete inability to surface their content. No scaled sorting, no “community bundling” - this is an important step in the right direction but there’s likely a lot more work needed to solve this problem.