2w ago

Algorithmic post ordering

In the screenshot you can see that there is currently one rising community overloading my post feed. I assume this is happening to many users. I understand that I can block the community but that's not really what I want. I think that this problem could be solved by introducing a mechanism to dynamically limit the number of such posts based on user preferences. For example I could set this community to appear less often and an algorithm could apply this preference to my feed order. I know that the proverbial algorithms used by major social networks are frowned upon. That happens for a good reason - they are opaque, proprietary and often show signs of bad intention. They are used for political and social influence, to silence opposing voices and a whole array of other nefarious goals like playing of people's fear, outrage, etc. The thing I'm suggesting would have to be transparent by design and fully optional. That's a social media "algorithm" I'd like to use. I'd like to hear what other people think about this idea.

4 comments

I think even just a frontend (web UI or mobile app) could fix this pretty easily
when it loads a page with many posts from the same community, it only shows 1 or 2 and puts the rest in a queue to show on later pages

Mastodon's filter system works wonders, where if you're seeing too much of some keyword you can block that temporarily or permanently, and either erase it entirely from your feed or hide matching posts in a spoiler. It would be awesome if something like that could be adapted for Lemmy.
For current client-agnostic solutions, you can do any of the following on Lemmy:
wait until the drama dies down
select Top [time period], Active, Scaled, New Comment sorts until you find something you like
change your scope to Local (for you that will be lemm.ee only so nothing from the shown communities), or curate the comms you like to see and change scope to Subscribed.
block the community you don't want to see, then set a calendar reminder for when you can go to your settings on the web, find the blocks tab and unblock it.

I ended up blocking the community so I could see any other posts. How does this happen with Lemmy? Like honestly, I am confused about this.
- Short answer? The service is still incredibly small and posts aren't usually flooding in second-by-second like you may be used to on the much bigger sites, so one over-agressive user can easily dominate the front page for a while, purposefully or not. That's just going to happen.
  If you'd rather not block the whole community, hide the individual posts as you spot them to free up your feed again. If one user keeps dominating your feed, just block them. That's the best we can do as regular users.