this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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General Discussion
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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.
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.
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.
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.
I know there are several PRs for this. Or at least were.
Here’s some threads I’m monitoring hoping it’s added.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
This one was closed as a duo of 818 - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
I think this with some instance agnostic linking that makes you always stay in your logged in instance, making subscribing and searching easier would be huge
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1156
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1048
Admittedly the devs seem weirdly hard headed about this but it seems they have blinders on and can only see it from a tech perspective. But given they are still open it does seamen promising. especially since they are still reviewing them (3071 was just closed as a dup 3 hours ago)
Yes 100%.
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.
So basically, yes this has been discussed a lot and there are various options for fixing it floating around. A few weeks ago there were all kinds of urgent gamebreaking bugs in the software that needed patching up, but hopefully things like sort algorithm improvements will have their time to shine soon.
As far as what the conversation looks like, here's a link to all the currently open Github issues searched for "sort". https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort Some of them will be more relevant and have more discussion than others, since people tend to make a lot of duplicates, but it should give you an idea of the current thinking.
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.
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.