Hello all,
Wanted to open a discussion on Lemmy’s post sorting options right now. I don’t have any experience with implementing this type of thing but right now the algorithm appears… Off? For example, ‘Active’ gives me a lot of posts over a day old but ‘Hot’ may as well be ‘New’ i.e. more recent posts with little engagement.
I don’t know if it’s due to Lemmy still picking up steam or a fundamental flaw with the algorithm. Like I said, I’m really curious to hear the opinions of those more knowledgeable.
My biggest issue is that posts stream in regardless of the sorting option you have picked. So, even if I am sorting by ‘hot’ posts I’ll get a stream of posts that where made less than a minute ago.
Absolutely my biggest annoyance as well.
I use “Top Day” and seem to be quite happy with it.
I just switched to this and it seems to be what I expect from ‘Hot’. Hot seems to include popular posts from weeks to months ago and that’s just not the definition of hot, really.
Nobody said it’s hot AND fresh
Thanks for the suggestion! This works much better!
I think having “Active” as default is unfortunate too, if a new user sees the top post was from two days ago they might assume the whole platform is inactive, since they can’t see that a new comment was added just seconds ago from that page view. Having “Hot” as the default would probably be better since those are usually newer posts with at least a few comments.
None of the megaguides I’ve seen actually show how to use the mobile apps/sites. I’ve been told what the Fediverse is and how it works enough times to build the backend myself, but I have no clue how to navigate.
That might be true. I’m glad you can set your own defaults but having the starting fknfkg to be a generally useful one is a good idea. Im curious if people find Local to be a good default? Subscribed doesn’t make sense I guess because you start out with no subscriptions. But maybe all is nice to find new communities and explore?
Maybe instance owners could have a recommended subscriptions option that new users could default to. That way new users can experience seeing content on other instances right away. Different instances with different standards could customize their new user experience.
I’ve been doing top of today.
I want to make 100% sure that in “Hot” you don’t just see big communities. I want to always see that one post from that one community with 1 user right at the top. So they should weight by community size.
Sorting by new comments gives posts with no comments! Pretty big annoyance for me tbh.
I’m not sure about the algos, but I’d kill if it would at least remember my choices between page refreshes.
Although it’s a little less convenient than just remembering across refreshes, you can set a default sort in your profile if there’s a particular sort you like.
That being said I find myself hopping between Top Day and Hot so I can only start on one or the other. Would be nice if it just remembered.
Remembering “subscribed” instead of “local” would be nice too.
I don’t know a lot about Lemmy’s implementation but a difficult thing to deal with is how do you “rank” a post? Like you have a small community of a few active people, but there’s federation with a massive community with lots of users - which posts are “better”?
Worse still, there’s an inherent lag/delay with the federated posts, a post that was very active in the last hour might have only been federated to the server in the last 5mins - so what do you do, do you bubble up all those posts or ignore it because there’s more recent and relevant things?
The kicker is that these decision points aren’t instant either, any system that’s doing this kind of ranking will have an algorithm as you describe, but that algorithm will take time to process all the data, while the data is coming in batches as each server federates with each other. It’s a difficult problem to solve.
It’s all open source, you can look at the algorithms here.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/index.html
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
I’m aware, what I am getting at is that there’s multiple “Right” answers to solving what is essentially a very difficult problem.
Like you have a small community of a few active people, but there’s federation with a massive community with lots of users - which posts are “better”?
I think this is where federation will get the most interesting. It would be cool to add/remove weight to some instances and communities. And each instance’s software could handle this differently with different algorithms.
I’m completely speculating because I’m high. I have no idea what Lemmy’s roadmap looks like. Would be cool though man.
Also, it has to be designed in a way that limits federated servers from gaming the system.
They need mark as read too. I keep seeing the same stuff.
If it helps, there’s a “Show Read Posts” toggle in your account settings- I believe “Read” is based on having ⬆️ / ⬇️ed the post.
Nice! Thanks
A lot of the discussion around sorting specifics makes me wonder if a plugin-like system for user created sorting algorithms would be useful.
It could allow you to curate your own feed in a way, based on age, activity, filters, basically any post metadata. The algorithms could be shared or maybe even federated through lemmy itself. I have a suspicion this would be closer to “neat” than “worth it” though. This is really just a brain dump of a random idea.
Reddit’s top hourly was one of my favorite ways to browse. They need to implement that here. Just show me the top posts from the last hour.
You can do Top Day with Lemmy now. Maybe not enough content yet for hourly.
There’s always enough content for top hourly. Top hourly is not enough
My best guess from the way it looks is that Active is like a forum or imageboard sort, where new comments “bump” old threads to the top. Hot appears to be more like “rising”, new posts that are interacted with more than others. Both probably make more sense with greater volume, but neither seem perfect for the structure of the site. I would also think “tuning the algorithms” is probably in the “when we get around to it” bucket for most of the people who would be handling that.
@programming
@WatTyler
There is a demo of an algorithmic timeline thingy for mastodon at https://fedifeed.herokuapp.com/ and I really really like how it has a bunch of sliders for fine-tuning. The time penalty in particular is very important.Would be absolutely awesome to have the same on lemmy.
Edit: Lemmy doesn’t show my picture…
Yeah, I’m feeling a bit lost here too. I’ve been using mostly ‘hot’ (found this post using it), but there’s also the issue with dynamic posts, that suddenly there’s a cascade of posts being loaded and you lose where you were on the feed.
It is unintended, a bug that is already known and will possibly disappear when support for websockets is removed (i.e. only plain HTTP traffic from you web browser to the server will remain).
do you know what the official github issue number is? Ide like to follow the progress on it as it is extremely annoying to me as well.
Found it here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1103
Thanks for that info, I just complained about this issue in a different thread. Guess I’ll just have to be more patient during this phase.
Yes! This is mega annoying and ruins my preferred way to use Lemmy.
I’m on jerboa, and like others are saying “active” is pretty ass and ‘hot’ is okay. My main actual complaint is the inability to sort comments! Please God, I’m tired of seeing the rare hateful message with 1/2 up votes on top, and then a more normal good comment with 50 up votes beneath it. Going to be a real problem for onboarding people and optics.
Yup, this is my biggest issue with Jerboa as well. Using the browser, it has a comment sort but it also has some scrolling bug that was making me unable to read headlines or click on posts haha.
