No matter which sort you use (except for new), content is recommended to you by activity. Depending on the sort (active, hot, top) it uses a slightly different mixture of votes/comments/time since post to determine the order.
The only exception is scaled, which boosts a little bit midsized communities, but still doesn’t manage to improve visibility of niche ones.
If lemmy is to truly start having active hobbyist communities instead of being 95% lefty US politics, removedposts, and some tech stuff, it needs a sort that takes into account the user’s engagement.
For example, if I upvote / comment often in a community, there should be an option to have posts from the community be boosted in my feed, even if it’s a tiny community.
Let’s say I’m subscribed to !world@lemmy.world and !news@lemmy.world because I want to occasionally see news. However, I’m also subscribed to a couple hundred other communities, some of them who don’t manage to get more than a couple upvotes on their biggest posts. And whenever I see them I’m replying/upvoting because I’m passionate about that topic.
My feed shouldn’t be 95% c/news and c/world because those are the most upvoted and commented. I shouldn’t have to scroll down hundreds of posts to find “big” posts in small communities I interact with at any opportunity I get.
That’s why I think it would be beneficial to lemmy if the sort/algorithm took into account your engagement in a way.
It doesn’t have to be complicated, you can have a single number “engagement score” for every community calculated with a basic formula, and that number is used as a boost to the community.
I’m aware that there are some examples of successful niche communities on lemmy. But that’s mainly because either a significant chunk of the lemmy userbase is into that niche (let’s face it the lemmy community is not a representative sample of the world population, we tend to be very similar people), or because the posts on it are simplified image/video type posts which appeal to people who don’t know much about the subject.
I realize my wording “Gave up on All” probably came off as if I wanted to use it and was disappointed I couldn’t, so I appreciate you trying to give me advice on how I could still use it. I’m happy doing things this way though. I find Subscribed far easier to use than playing whack-a-mole with the many, many meme communities that inevitably have a “haha the world SUCKS” post, and then understandable but still-not-good-for-me-personally vents about the world sucking in the comments. Or news communities (not just politics!) that inevitably post something that could tie into politics, and then all the politics in the comments. You said it’s exhausting yourself, and I simply don’t have the energy to put quite that much effort into it. If you find it worth it anyways, more power to you, but I really don’t mind missing out on something I might like in exchange for missing out on 1) stuff I really don’t like and 2) a lot of stuff I’m ambivalent about and would rather just scroll past.
I do look at !newcommunities@lemmy.world, which is good enough for me in my opinion re: discovering new stuff, and although this isn’t really the purpose of !fedigrow@lemm.ee, it often tells me about communities I didn’t know about. And sometimes I click Communities on an instance and wander through the list.
Ah, this is indeed the main thing:-).
Fwiw, it also helps to block people. I mean, that sounds obvious, but in a couple cases I started to notice how I may not need to block an entire community since I could get the same effect by blocking the user - plus also not see their posts in other communities as well. Or maybe I’m deluding myself and perhaps I later went on to block the entire community. Some really do just have so many trash articles that it’s not worth getting upset about each one individually so much as simply moving onwards to better ones:-).