I’ve noticed that there are a few communities that tend to dominate when viewing all. Some days it gets to where looking at all isn’t very different than just looking at [email protected] or [email protected].
Before someone says “you can just block communities you don’t want to see,” it’s not that I never want to see them, it’s that I want to be able to have a view that shows me what is new and popular in a wide variety of communities. I appreciate seeing a few good memes in my feed. The problem is when that’s all I see. Changing the sort from active to hot or top x days doesn’t have much effect on which communities dominate, so that isn’t the solution either.
“You can just subscribe to communities you like”. True, but that has the effect of narrowing what I see. I’d like a view that showed me new things I never thought to subscribe to.
Lemmy devs - if you are reading this - it would be nice to have a feed that limited the number of posts showing up from any particular community. It could be a simple cutoff of 2 or 3 posts, or maybe some sort of weighting function to cause additional posts from the same community to appear lower in the sort order for that feed.
I’d love to hear what devs and other users think about this.
Edit: To everyone saying “just sort be new” - yes, that has its uses, but it only solves part of the problem. I’d like a feed that shows me what is new and popular, but from more than just one or two communities.
A quick, but a little dirty solution for this, would be communities having “tags” in their metadata. This wouldn’t prevent spam, or an accumulation of four trillion tags, but you could easily add “only these tags,” or “not these tags,” to any feed. User objects have metadata that is used like this (as the “bot” flag) already. I’m just familiar enough with the code to know it wouldn’t be a slam dunk, but it’s also not a breaking change or re-write!
Tags would be great, and a much better way of controlling your feed than blocking communities or instances. Just because I usually don’t want to see memes or shitposts doesn’t mean I’m never in the mood for them. It could also potentially help people who don’t want porn in their feed but want to keep non-porn NSFW visible.
Maybe they could even integrate with Mastodon’s hashtags