I was just scrolling through my feed. This whole Firefox Chrome instanced post I have seen literally 15 times. Most of my feed is nothing but that post.
I understand trying to get Lemmy popular. And I understand distributing knowledge of this.
Sorry if I sound like I’m complaining. I want to like Lemmy. But I’m struggling. And I can’t do reddit.
Maybe I need to figure out a different algorithm like more threads to follow?
Maybe I’m part of too many technology threads. :)
I have noticed there are like 6 news instances that all basically post the exact same things every day and if I view all sometimes I’ll see the same story posted 5 times in a row. I think this is something that will change over time as some of these basically identical instances get more popular and others disappear.
It feels like growing pains of a new platform
I applaud the mods that shut down their duplicate communities.
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Yea, just today I basically decided that I should probably cull the number of “news” communites I’m subscribed to … I noticed that I’m subscribed to a few, which are all basically duplicating each other, and that I don’t need all that in my feed. I imagine similar things will happen over time.
I do think something could be done at the platform level though, where posts that are sharing the same link can automatically be linked to each other a little like a cross-post link, and then such linked posts can be grouped together in your feed.
Don’t know if reddit ever had such a thing (I don’t recall as much), but it sounds like it would be intuitive, still facilitate community diversity, allow users to visit multiple communities on the same issue if they wish, but also allow the user to more easily sift through repeated links.
I believe what you’re experiencing is just part of the growing pains of Lemmy. I’m here from reddit as well, and something to keep in mind is this: According to the-federation.info, on May 1st of this year, there were 2,750 active users on Lemmy. Today, there are 85,045 active users, an increase of ~31x. The sorting algorithms for content on Lemmy are meant to handle a few dozen posts a day, not thousands. This causes things like Hot to show four year old posts just a few pages in, or the same article to be posted to the many duplicate communities that are springing up as Lemmy explodes in size. Over time, centralization will happen to a degree (it’s already happening with lemmy.world vastly outstripping lemmy.ml as the largest instance), which will consolidate the horde of communities into only a few, like how subreddits that offered the same type of content eventually consolidate into one or two.
Is there really a meaningful difference between /r/damnthatsinteresting and /r/interestingasfuck (prior to the protests)? Not really, but then there’s also /r/interesting, /r/mildlyinteresting, /r/moldlyinteresting, /r/interestingaf, /r/interestinggifs, /r/utterlyinteresting, /r/interestingbutcreepy, /r/reallyinteresting… I think you see the point. Right now, you’re subscribed to ALL of those, and people are aggressively trying to grow each one, which means they see a LOT of duplicate content. As Lemmy stabilizes, a lot of them will wither and essentially die off. It just takes time. The tough part is not knowing which communities will become THE community for a topic, so subscribing to all of them for now makes sure you won’t miss it.
It’s a bit of a concern though that as people decide which instance to post things to, they’ll tend to settle on the biggest instances, and after a while we’ll have a single centralized site that just happens to be federated with a bunch of sites no one uses. Federation will become irrelevant to how most people use it, and other instances won’t attract users or posts.
Because I don’t want to see Lemmy morph into Reddit, I try to scatter my posts to different instances. For each post I’ll pick a couple of instances and I’ll try to vary my choice a bit from post to post. I’d rather see some duplication and have things remain distributed, than have a single instance where all the activity takes place.
I hope moving communities and accounts from different instances becomes possible. I would like to see communities start moving away congregating on the largest instance, and instead maybe start joining instances based on topic. So all music related instances whether it be specific genres or bands go to a music instance. And tv show ones go to an entertainment instance. So everything just kind of becomes categorized into something easier follow and find when it comes to looking for new communities.
This sounds like a support question on how you can change the contents of your feed. Please check the sidebar for suggestions on where you can find support. Removing per rule #3.
Duplicate subs, people bulk posting, low content volume are all growing pains that I think will be a lot better in a couple months.
Apart from that, my advice is to experiment. I use Connect on mobile and usually switch between All/Frontpage and Hot/New. There are options on the app to hide seen posts. If you look at All a lot you’ll probably want to block communities to make your feed a better experience.
Using connect also. ;) And yea I need to tailor my feed a bit better.
People crossposting to the comical number of same-but-mines-different-communities can shit up a feed pretty quick. I’d suggest cutting down on a few of your tech groups and see how it works for you then.
yeah it’s kind of gross how ‘thirsty’ some posters are for spamming content across multiple instances.
Which sorting algorithm do you use? Hot and Active are Broken, New and New comments are better
Hot and Active work fine on some instances. Depends how the instance admin have implemented them.
Do you mean admins that are running a fork of Lemmy? Hot and Active are plSQL functions, you can find them in the source code.
I don’t think it’s true that hot and active are broken.
I think the situation is more that the process that calculates the score of posts, which is used by hot and active to rank posts, can get behind the number of posts and so not update the score of older posts. This is why, when you do have a problem with hot (which I think is the more problematic algorithm), you’ll see quite old posts appear out of no where.
My understanding is that this issue has been fixed recently and should probably appear in the next update. The fix, from what I saw, was to make the score calculation process substantially faster such that it really shouldn’t have trouble keeping up with all posts. I haven’t checked in with github about this recently though so there’s a chance this isn’t the complete picture.
Broader point though, about hot and active, is that they seem to be broken not as algorithms, but because the underlying score of older posts can be way higher than they should.
In my experience, I hardly see this issue now, and usually you can skip through the old posts that turn up out of nowhere.
I mostly agree with you, I was just trying to give a quick fix to OP to solve their issue.
I also noticed they they are registered on lemmyverse.org, which is a quite small instance, which might also explain the poor browsing experience
Woah … for such a great instance name and having open registrations … very small. Interesting.
If that’s what’s happening then maybe the algorithm should weight scores towards the newer posts, so that a post’s rank in the algorithm decreases as it ages.
Yea I don’t all the details so I can’t answer that intelligently. But it stands to reason that the root problem of having a score calculating process that can get behind is worth solving one way or the other. Especially, provided what I read is true, if it can be made much faster such that you really won’t need to worry about that problem again.
It sounds like you’re just subscribed to a lot of very similar communities. Personally I generally pick one community I like instead of subscribing to something like “Technology” on 10 different instances. Haven’t seen a lot of repeated posts.
Duplication even comes up in the “All” postlist. Where the only course of action is to block all the similar communities except one
Same. I’ve recently been trying to switch between hot, active, new, and top to see what gets me the best blend of new posts, though some smaller or slower instances still get missed. I just started manually going into other communities that I don’t see often and making an effort to browse them on their own. That helps to get away from the repetition and news overload. I might just have to make more of an effort to search out things I want to see.
I’m curious to see if Themis will be improved or we’ll just have to get used to it.
I swear if I see another post about how stupid X is for a name I’m gonna lose it
Weirdly enough this is something the subscribed feed fixed but the all feed did not. If someone crossposts something in your subscribed communities it shows up as just one post and says “crossposted to X, Y, Z”. If you browse by All it shows all the crossposts as separate posts. I wonder if it’s a bug.
Also, have a look at this post: https://lemmy.ml/post/1769252
Try sorting by All and Hot. That seems to get the best results for me. When I see duplicate posts I just keep scrolling
Maybe I’m part of too many technology threads. :)
Grooming your feed is pretty vital right now. I know they’re working on better sorting algorithms which should help a bit. For busy topics I’ve had to decide on one or two communities to follow. I’ve been thinking those communities that have a lot of iterations would start to combine, but there has been enough servers going offline that I think its promoting them staying separate.
Thanks. I was actually working on weeding out which ones I don’t really need since they keep da cross post.
Hmm. Yea I could see a couple combining. We shall see. :)
