Fediverse

+100

The default “hot” sorting algorithm needs to prioritize smaller communities. Yes, I know we have new comments and scaled, but a classic UX principle is most users use the defaults.

I use subscribed feeds, sorted by "scaled". It pushes stuff from smaller communities I'm interested in up higher. Scaled doesn't work that well on All though. It does mean I need to subscribe to things first, but I generally just subscribe to everything I'm interested in. I also browse All sorted by Top 6h regularly, to see what else is happening. Pretty good combo.

If you want to see smaller communities, sort by "Scaled"

If you REALLY want to browse All, try the "New Comments" sort, it's like old forums

But I rarely look at All, mostly just Subscribed or Local

PieFed's categories of communities / Topic areas does this. When I used Lemmy I never found anything remotely close to that, but perhaps the best was to (1) visit each and every community that you want to check up on individually, and/or (2) use New rather than Hot or Top... and then be prepared to block hundreds of communities that you never want to see content from, like sports or individual locations (cities, towns, stateships, regions, countries, etc.).

PieFed also combines all comments across all cross-posts, reversing the fragmentation effect from having too many communities split across many instances.

You all on Lemmy need to catch up!:-P

I think you might benefit from trying the "local" feed, which is just your home instance :)

It could perhaps be better communicated though, but I'm not sure what framing or label might make it more clear what local means for less technical folks

It might just be something people need to learn because the fediverse is a different thing than traditional social platforms. But I don't think that possibility should stop us from improving clarity if we can think of a good way to do so :)

Try All + scaled it order active posts and scales it so its not dominated by large communties.. Also yeah its expected large communities will dominate an all inclusive feed. They product the most content and have the most users.

I hear you, but this is a problem that I've solved by browsing the splash as Posts/All/New. It helps to catch rando posts that I wouldn't normally stumble across.

Allowing a user-configurable option to sort posts based solely on the current instance would address this by making the content feed more localized and personalized, helping each instance maintain its unique character and fostering community discovery without being overshadowed by larger instances.