Hey, I am pretty new to this whole fediverse thing an one of the biggest hurdles for me is getting actually started and find communities that are active and match my interests.
I feel that because of the federation I have to take twice the action compared to other alternatives in the sense that I have to actively search for communities I could potentially be interested in and then decide if they are something for me.
Personally I feel an algorithm that combines posts from different communities helps a lot because I only have to look at posts there and if I like them I can join the community it comes from.
Now my question/proposal:
If I understood correctly Lemmy is somewhat compatible with Mastodon, so I will mix some things of both.
I know bot accounts are possible, so what if we used them to create (biased) home pages for Lemmy instances? Like I would imagine these bots get a curated list of communities and once a post reaches a threshold of some sort (like a certain number of likes/comments) the bot “boosts” the post. “Boosting” is taken from Mastodon so idk what the Lemmy equivalent is, potentially posting to a custom community?
Obviously these bots could implement arbitrarily complex algorithms to determine how the ‘home page’ looks like. And potentially different ‘home pages’ can exist to choose from depending on the algorithm someone likes. Best of all it would all be optional, so if people don’t like an algorithm they just ignore the bot.
What do you think? Does that sound like something you would use? Do you know if that is even possible to actually realize? What are potential drawbacks?
TL:DR Could we potentially use bots to aggregate posts from different communities, with the intention to have a ‘home page’?
I get what you mean, but wouldn’t that be the same result as simply switching from local to all in your browser or app?
It would be pretty similar but more flexible, because the algorithm for choosing what to show can be more complex.
As an example, suppose a smaller community usually has usually posts which average 1-5 likes. If there was now a post that recieves let’s say 30 likes, that would be a very good post in context of the community but when looking at at the top of all it would possibly be overshadowed by bigger communities with higher average likes.
This custom aggregation of posts could allow to highlight such ‘high quality’ posts of smaller communities.
This is just an example, the actual selection could be more intricate.
Just go to all
All is nice but I haven’t figured out a sorting setting I like there yet.
Sorting by new shows a lot of lower quality posts.
Sorting by most votes is dominated by bigger communities.
Using aggregator bots would allow for custom sorting without forcing it on everyone.
There’s also sort by hot, just like reddit.
What you want isn’t a home page, because there is already a home page with a bunch of sorting options. What you want is an auto repost subreddit.
Thanks! I completely missed that, I don’t know how exactly it works but it looks really good for now.
I personally would have liked if the apps/website start out with all/hot for new users so they have a easier time finding communities worth joining, but I guess that’s down to personal preference.
Maybe custom bots are still viable for more advanced stuff but I could not think of any use case right now.