Fediverse

PieFed has some features that I find helpful in this regard.

One is the Categories of Communities. You'll only see News in the News category or in the non-category search methods (standard Subscribed/All/New/etc.).

Another is the ability to follow - and arguably more important unfollow - everything. Including communities, posts, people, etc. I once made the mistake of replying to a comment in [email protected], and another in Lemmygrad.ml, and the replies kept coming for WEEKS and WEEKS - I almost quit the Fediverse entirely at that point, and I hear that scenario repeated by others as well. But on PieFed, not only can I unfollow any conversation at any time, but unlike Lemmy it also allows a true blocking of all users from any instance you choose (edit: to clarify, I mean without requiring an admin to do it for you and everyone else on the same instance at the same time - a personal defederation that affects nobody else, just like a block, except that Lemmy doesn't allow blocking users from instances, only communities from instances which is nowhere close to being the same thing).

Ofc nothing is perfect - e.g. I decided to unfollow [email protected] bc I don't want to read 5 of those in a row every morning, and rather would want to savor just one at a time. Also it would be nice to separate comment replies (that seem more urgent, for the sake of an active conversation) from e.g. a new post that you haven't seen yet? But for a true niche community, with let's say less than a handful of posts every day and you want to be notified about every single one? It seems perfect for that.

The UI for PieFed needs far more polish, especially outside of the narrow range of short comments on posts with few of those in number. e.g. far too often the existing notifications don't work as the reply to your comment got buried away onto some other page entirely, in an effort to streamline reading but then that not interacting well with the newer (unfinished?) notifications feature. But while it lacks much polish that Lemmy's UI and apps have, it also has so many features like those mentioned above that Lemmy lacks as well, and may move faster in its development due to using a more common programming language. It is so nice to have choices to pick from:-).

Otherwise on Lemmy you could make alts, like one subscribed to News communities, another for Memes and Shitposts, etc. Blocking users would get super annoying bc you'd have to do it multiple times. Blocking the largest news communities and the accounts that usually fill them, and then sorting by New can help, but it requires enormous curation efforts to get there and even then falls far short of what you asked - e.g. you also, still have to bookmark or otherwise check each one of your highly active communities one by one (edit: I mean niche ones here, bc the chances of seeing a post there on New can still be slim, if you are concerned about seeing EVERY post there rather than just find something to read from across hundreds of subscribed communities, so different solutions for different workflows).

Lemmy is great for checking memes, reading tech or politics news, and liking Linux - but for everything else it needs improvements to be made to support. I'm not going back to Reddit though:-).

Although there were some proposed solutions for this issue, when scaled sort was implemented, @[email protected] closed all related issues, even when they weren't being solved by scaled sort. So, it's clear that since there are no longer any open issues about this, no one is going to care about solving it. Therefore, it seems like the only option is to accept this fact and learn to cope with it. At this point, I've come to terms with the fact that Lemmy is mainly a platform for shitposts, while Reddit is for everything else. When I look at the feed, I mostly see memes, US politics, and some tech.

Custom feeds may not be the most efficient solution due to scalability concerns. However, an alternative approach could be to make the metadata about the posts (votes, comments, etc) available through an API call. This would enable users to develop their own algorithms for content discovery and potentially create a more personalized experience. Users could then implement, share and install these algorithms using tools like Tampermonkey or other userscript managers.

Try Quiblr. It's a lemmy client with exactly the features you ask for. It checks your engagement, and filters and sorts your feed based on what it learned from your habits.

I'd love custom feeds, it was the one of the things I really liked about reddit

Let’s say I’m subscribed to [email protected] and [email protected] because I want to occasionally see news.

I have this exact problem and it's maddening. Fucking "news", which is mostly just political posts about how shitty Republicans are completely drowns out all of my smaller niche communities!

I don't know how to fix the problem but the USER needs some way to control their feed. We either need to be able to throttle the larger communities or boost the smaller ones.

I'd rather be allowed to reverse sort on any of the algorithms. It would show content with less engagement and probably and up pushing up content from those niche communities you speak of.

This sounds like the sort of thing that's best solved with a 'favourite' option that pushes posts from favourited communities to the top of the feed. No need to get in there and over-complicate it with bespoke weightings or anything.

Nah. Algorithms, especially personalized as a way of sorting a feed are just a shite idea. Maybe one of the iOS apps will add something like that but if anything is being different is a selling point. I got two friends on fedi by telling them that "it has no algorithm" which is a simplification of course but you get the gist. It also really hits home that this is not a corporate product.

No matter which sort you use (except for new),

Yes, sorting by new is best. The rest of the post seems irrelevant.

I wish the web ui (and apps) could work like an old fashioned usenet reader, where it would list your subscribed communities and say how many unread posts each one had. I don't like having all the communities jumbled together. That seems fixable.

The biggest problem with lemmy for me is the multiple "duplicate" communities.

There should be a feature to combine them at the client level. So the 3 different "privacy" communities could just be viewed as one on my lemmy client

I agree that fediverse needs a personalized "explore" page in general. For example, this is the only plus feature of Bluesky over Mastodon (in terms of technology). It is obvious how big difference it makes.

I generally avoid the evil algorithms found on other social networks, but I hope we see that in Lemmy.