• Its been a focus of mine to try to make lemmy’s comment sorting the opposite of the reddit experience, where the highest rated comment is nearly always just the first one, making all engagement after those first few minutes pointless.

    The active sort does a good job of bumping new activity on older posts (limited to 2 days) back to the top. There’s also a New Comments sort that doesn’t have that 2-day limit (making it basically a forum sort), but I don’t know how many people use it.

    Not sure what else we could do tho, the main problem is probably just the smaller number of users. Which needs to be tackled by convincing reddit communities and their mods to move them over to some lemmy instance.

    More on lemmy’s ranking algorithm here..

    • This is a great comment, thank you. Very good links.

      Do you know how federation affects the sorts? I assume, based on my longer experience with Mastodon, that the All feed is actually just all of the posts that have been federated to my instance i.e. someone on my instance is subscribed to that community. So any communities no one on my server is subscribed to are invisible regardless of sort.

      That implies the All feed is unique to each server, and therefore all of the sorts are also unique. Which would mean for at least a certain percentage of posts, they might be in your hot or active feeds, even though no one is really interacting with them much any more.

      What do you think? Maybe it doesn’t work as much like Mastodon as I think, but since it’s all the same fediverse it feels like a logical assumption.

      • Put simply, the sorting / ranking is based on the score and the time published, so as long as things are getting federated within a few seconds, then federated posts / comments are no different from local ones. Mastodon only sorts things by newest AFAIK.

        That implies the All feed is unique to each server, and therefore all of the sorts are also unique. Which would mean for at least a certain percentage of posts, they might be in your hot or active feeds, even though no one is really interacting with them much any more.

        Should only be an issue if your server blocks other ones.

          • Ah, this is completely different and has nothing to do with sorting. All means the latter, IE communities connected to your instance, that your instance knows about. Lemmy doesn’t crawl anything, federated communities need to get subscribed to first, then posts can start coming in for them.

    • Its been a focus of mine to try to make lemmy’s comment sorting the opposite of the reddit experience, where the highest rated comment is nearly always just the first one, making all engagement after those first few minutes pointless.

      I think your strategy for going the opposite than reddit works quite well when it comes to comments. However, I don’t think it fits so well with posts (not sure if the strategy/sorting for posts and comments use the same methods). Personally I don’t feel great seeing posts older than 24 hours, especially as I have probably already seen that post. It’ll just stick around for way too long.

    • Could there be a one-click way to automatically ‘import’ a Reddit subreddit over to a Lemmy community? Meaning, create it, import the sidebars, welcomes, rules, graphics, etc. so it looks familiar to regular users. If not, at least a step-by-step tutorial on how mods could do it.

      Another option would be to provide something like a crossposting Chrome or Firefox extension that lets people simultaneously post content to both Reddit and Lemmy. Give them a smooth transition path.

      Lastly, the Bluesky concept of ‘pluggable algorithms’ is one way to make it so users can choose whatever sort works best for their interests.