No matter which sort you use (except for new), content is recommended to you by activity. Depending on the sort (active, hot, top) it uses a slightly different mixture of votes/comments/time since post to determine the order.
The only exception is scaled, which boosts a little bit midsized communities, but still doesnāt manage to improve visibility of niche ones.
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 userās engagement.
For example, if I upvote / comment often in a community, there should be an option to have posts from the community be boosted in my feed, even if itās a tiny community.
Letās say Iām subscribed to !world@lemmy.world and !news@lemmy.world because I want to occasionally see news. However, Iām also subscribed to a couple hundred other communities, some of them who donāt manage to get more than a couple upvotes on their biggest posts. And whenever I see them Iām replying/upvoting because Iām passionate about that topic.
My feed shouldnāt be 95% c/news and c/world because those are the most upvoted and commented. I shouldnāt have to scroll down hundreds of posts to find ābigā posts in small communities I interact with at any opportunity I get.
Thatās why I think it would be beneficial to lemmy if the sort/algorithm took into account your engagement in a way.
It doesnāt have to be complicated, you can have a single number āengagement scoreā for every community calculated with a basic formula, and that number is used as a boost to the community.
Iām aware that there are some examples of successful niche communities on lemmy. But thatās mainly because either a significant chunk of the lemmy userbase is into that niche (letās face it the lemmy community is not a representative sample of the world population, we tend to be very similar people), or because the posts on it are simplified image/video type posts which appeal to people who donāt know much about the subject.
Maybe I have settings wrong or something. But is it possible to get a for you feed with only my subscribed communities?
Not at this time. I built the For You feed to be flexible for both signed in and not-signed in users. I can look into adding it as a feature, but it may take a while because Im working to finish the native mobile apps at the moment
cheers.
IMO would be a cool feature.
Because I often get posts I donāt have a clue about because Iām not subscribed to that community, take like 15 secs to understand what the hell is on my screen, and then the for you algorithm starts pushing that community even more because I stayed on it a while.
Ahh I see. If that happens in the future, you can also click the 3 dots on the post and press āShow Lessā. It will add more weight so it rise up in the For You feed