I feel the need to be pedantic here: that quote continues on to the very next (and final) sentence being:

Not something that can be done with a simple plugin.

However, anything that is logically possible, is doable, with enough effort & investment - e.g. that infamous quote:

All that quote means is that it would be most simple to do as a back-end task, not a simple front-end one (though even a front-end could, in theory, e.g. slurp up 1000 posts and then use some metric to figure out how to display the most proper subset of 20 from that superset).

But for instance, someone could spin up their own instance, and then add whatever sorting method they wanted to it. However, recall again what happened to DMV.social - anyone who opens up a Lemmy server will be spammed with CSAM, it would seem - so there are other more urgent matters to be attended to first, unless that someone used it purely as a testbed, and made all connections to it to be read-only, or else had a team of moderators willing to put in large amounts of time to fend off those attacks with both manual efforts and also developing automated tools at the same time - e.g. they would need to have technical skill even just to moderate, much less administer the machine (unless, like existing Lemmys, there is a whole team of admins doing the technical parts already). Anyway, I don’t suggest this lightly like it is trivially easy, just to say that it is possible.

It would be beneficial to talk more about these desirable features to ensure that when developers do invest time in them, we’ve already come up with a good and robust solution.

Sure, I am not trying to tell you what to do. Just stating that until and unless someone is willing to tinker with actual implementations - and again, right now their attentions seem to be directed elsewhere, plus while Scaled-sorting Hot may not be perfect it is something (I don’t personally have experience to say if it is better than before b/c I was on Kbin.Social at the time which was totally different - but I thought I heard many people say that it is better now?) - then it is going to be a purely theoretical discussion. Which is probably how Scaled sort got implemented too? Though now that it is built, it could be tinkered with, if there is the will to do so.

But unless you are offering to do any of the actual implementation work yourself, I think you would need to discuss this with the actual admins who you would expect to do that work for you - hence you might try Matrix where they hang out, rather than solely discussing it here.

And then, as you said in your OP, when they say “no” and close all GitHub issues, that, as they say, is that. You can’t “force” someone to do work for you for free - and even if you were offering money, or perhaps offering to do all the “design” work yourself for free, they still would need to agree to actually do the implementation.

Moreover, even if you DID offer to do ALL of the implementation work entirely on your own, unless you do want to spin up your own instance to actually run it on, you still would need the buy-in of the instance admins, for which having the buy-in of the developers would go a LONG way.

So you asked:

Do you have any ideas or suggestions on how Lemmy could better surface content from smaller communities?

And my suggestion is that you cannot walk into someone else’s house and tell them how they should do things. Especially when they have ALREADY said no. They know better what their prioritization is, and what they hope to accomplish over the next month, year, and so on. The absolute beauty of the Fediverse is that you can take all of the existing Lemmy code, which is entirely functional, make a fork of it, and spin up your own instance - and not just run it, but even modify the code to do… whatever you want! And then you can share that code, and benefit all the instances that are running Lemmy too! Discuss.Online, Lemmy.World - all of them, well, those that choose to keep your suggestions, though it is up to each one individually to either accept or reject them, and it is ultimately their call. Reddit does not work this way, nor FaceBook/Meta/Threads, Instagram, Xhitter, etc., but we do, b/c it is “open-source”. The caveat to that being… that someone, somewhere, must put in the actual effort to get it done.

And the people who would normally do that, seem to have said no. I gather that you feel frustrated but… it is what it is. Therefore, of what use is it to talk about any of this, when there is no path forward for it? THAT is how to move forward your ideas: either find or become someone yourself who can implement them, and THEN in talking to them you will actually be in an even better position to understand how it all works, and how it might be changed to work even better than it does now.

I dunno, perhaps I should not have replied at all? Sometimes I do overshare my thoughts and if you disliked that here then I apologize:-). It was my hope to help spur your thoughts along these lines that I was thinking, since it seems to me to be the only way forward. But I guess please ignore me if you think I am wrong, and I wish you luck either way!:-)

Fwiw, I do agree that eventually, when the developers are ready to move forward with this again, they indeed might appreciate a ready-made solution if one happened to be already available by then, but again that assumes that one could be made purely on theoretical grounds alone?

Step 1: it would be nice if we could at least talk about this in a friendly & civilized manner. I have spent a portion of my day today trying to defend even so much as casually mentioning in passing - in a reply to a reply to a reply even, iirc, much less a full-on post - that I would like something similar to what you said. I give up whenever I detect that someone literally did not read what I already wrote, at which point I see that they just wanted to complain rather than add something of substance to the ongoing conversation. And even if we took it for granted that I was a dummy Mc-Stoopid-buttface, nobody bothered once to explain why I might be wrong.

i.e., there seems to be significant push-back to this approach. I have no idea why though - it seems entirely logical and do-able to me? Especially if it were purely optional, like a new sort option rather than taking over the existing Hot one? At a guess, it may just be a difficult task, so it awaits someone to be interested enough to actually implement it. Also, please remember that the entire Fediverse has and continues to be under perpetual attack (message from DMV.social closing down due to being spammed by illegal CP & CSAM amid concerns over the ethical considerations of being a server that allows posts from external users, i.e. the entire Federation model, quoting: “Quite frankly, this is disturbing and I just don’t want to deal with the possibility of this crap.”) - I do not know if it is Huffman, or Musk, or Zuckerberg, or whoever might not enjoy how this could potentially take away from their profits, but they are correct that if we continue to exist on our own, that we need to do something to protect ourselves against this type of thing. So… sorting is important yes, but I could see if it was not the HIGHEST priority, right now.

But moving on, one thought regarding it: allow each user their own customization filters for each “category” of posts, e.g. 1% politics, 2% sports, restrict news to 5% (though the latter requires significantly deeper thinking to implement - e.g. is an article in a Technology sub still “news”? tbh, “news” is probably not a real category then). Or, as you say, an algorithm that would just work mostly fine for most people. The problem with all of this being that tags would have to exist first, so someone would have to develop that before any of this could begin to be developed and tested.

Which brings us back to: it is really fun to talk about such matters, but ultimately it will take someone rolling up their sleeves first, maybe learning an entirely new language (or several - according to this GitHub page, Lemmy is: “Rust 76.4% PLpgSQL 16.4% TypeScript 5.5% Shell 1.5% Other 0.2%”), and just getting something done. Otherwise, beggars cannot also be choosers, if there is nothing else available to choose from.

This is the model that Wikipedia uses and, while there are most definitely detractions, there are also significant benefits as well. Email spam filters too.

In one sense, it is a lot like irl democracy - with all the perks and pitfalls therein. For one it could lead to echo chamber reinforcement, though I don’t think this one is a huge deal b/c so too can our current moderator setup, and if anything a trust system may be less susceptible, by virtue of spreading out the number of available “moderators” for each category of action?

The single greatest challenge I can think of to this working is that like democracy, it is vulnerable to outsider attack, wherein e.g. if someone could fake 100k bots to upvote a particular person’s posts, they could in a fairly short time period elevate them to high status artificially. Perhaps this issue could be dealt with by performing a weighted voting scheme so that not all upvotes are equal, and e.g. an upvote from a higher-status account would count significantly more than an upvote from an account that is only a few hours old. Note that ofc this only reinforces the echo chamber issue all the more, b/c if you just join, how could you possibly hope to argue against a couple of people who have been on the platform for many years? The answer, ofc, is that you go elsewhere to start your own place, as is tradition. Which exasperates still further the issue of finding “good” places but… that is somewhat a separate matter, needing a separate solution in place for it (or maybe that is too naive of me to say?).

Btw the word “politics” essentially means “how we agree”, and just as irl we are all going to have different ideas about how to achieve our enormous variety of goals, so too would that affect our preferences for social media. And at least at first, I would expect that many people may hate it, so I would hope that this would be made an opt-in feature by default.

Also, and for some reason I expect this next point to be quite unpopular, especially among some of the current moderators: we already have a system in place for distinguishing b/t good vs. bad content, or at least popular vs. unpopular - it is called “voting”. I have seen some fairly innocuous replies get removed, citing “trolling” or some such, when someone dares to, get this, innocently ask a question, or perhaps state a known fact out-of-context (I know, sea-lioning exists too, I don’t mean that). Irl someone might patiently explain why the other person was wrong or insensitive, or just ignore and move past it, but a mod feels a burden to clean up their safe spaces. So now I wonder, will this effect be exaggerated far further, and worse become capricious as a result? Personally I have had several posts that got perhaps 5 downvotes in the first few minutes, but then in the next few hours got >10-100x greater upvotes. So are the people looking at something RIGHT NOW more important than the 100 people that would look at it an hour from then? Even more tricky, what about the order that the votes are delivered in - would a post survive if the up- and down-voting were delivered more evenly, or like a person playing their hands at gambling, would their post get removed if it ever got too many losses in a row, thus preventing it from ever achieving whatever its true weight would have meant? If so, then people will aim to always talk in a “safe” manner, b/c nothing else would ever be allowed to be discussed, on the off-chance that someone (or 5 someones) could be offended by it (even if a hundred more studious people would have loved to have seen it, if they had been offered the chance - but being busier irl, were not offered the chance by the “winner take all” nature of social media posts, where they are either removed or they are not removed, there really is no middle ground… so far).

So to summarize that last point: mods can be fairly untrustworthy (I say this as a former one myself:-P), but so too can regular people, and since HARD removal takes away people’s options to make up their own minds, why not leave most posts in and let voting do its work? Perhaps a label could be added, which users could select in their settings not to show “potentially controversial” material.

These are difficult and weighty matters to try to solve.

Lol, well *I* thought it was funny:-P. You might get fewer fake internet point reductions if you threw in a /s.

I would consider going to https://www.cc.com/shows/the-daily-show when Jon Stewart returns (that man has such grace and class, nobody since comes close), if they offer full-episode videos within a week of airing whereas YouTube does not. My point here is that there needs to be a REASON to go somewhere. YouTube combined both the “video hosting” and also “content aggregation” components, so even if we replace the former - and yes, some of us really WOULD choose to go to 8 different websites, for 8 different pieces of content that are worthwhile - it would get that much harder for someone to even know that the videos on the other places exist.

On top of that, when you just happen to be on YouTube, it suggests something that you might want to watch - a related video, e.g. George Carlin perhaps - and you can enjoy watching that. Whereas 8 different websites are going to have at most 1/8th of the content, and probably several orders of magnitude less than that realistically. So as long as the ads are not TOO burdensome - let’s say limited to 5s each and at most 2 of them - they will “win”.

Also, I really do want Jon Stewart to get credit for my having watched one of his videos, yet watching the identical video from like Vanced or Piped or something deprives him of those tracking metrics, which are worth a lot more than mere money (which at this point he’d likely just donate to charity or some such).

YouTube wormed their way into our hearts, like an abusive spouse, and now just dares us to divorce them - they push the edge as far as they possibly can, knowing that we hate them now yet not caring one bit, unless enough of us will ACTUALLY go. At which point they’ll lawyer or buy out the other place that we would go to, in an effort to drag us back in, kicking and screaming. It’s a horribly abusive model for a “relationship”, where our consent really doesn’t matter at all, only what they can get away with, by any means necessary. And the sad fact is that many of us have greatly reduced the amount that we watch such videos entirely, but that makes next to no impact on them at all. So long as they can sell US as the product to advertising companies by being “THE” place to put their ads, they will continue their parasitic chokehold on our society.

I like Lemmy too - it is not even trying to replicate other social media sites (well, it is but it cannot succeed, so we accept that about it), and while it has enormous technical hurdles, e.g. every single time I visit my instance in via a browser, whether desktop or mobile, I have to re-login again, and sometimes (rarely) even while browsing internally. That’s… not ideal, though it’s still a million times better than the toxic filth crowd that is Reddit (having more to do with culture than technology ofc, and yet the two are not entirely unconnected). Whereas other places, such as Mastodon, just seem doomed internally b/c by their very nature “everyone else” has to go there too or it just won’t work. Otherwise, you still need like a Xitter account to follow them, and a Facebook account to follow them, and so on (I actually do not have either, but I understand that some people will feel the need to).

Buying in brick-and-morter is facilitated by having a car, even in a city, otherwise it gets really rough trying to go without that, especially for even the smallest furniture items like a chair that you’d basically have to pay for delivery. It can be done, but does get difficult.

Back to YouTube though, yeah you go where you can find the goods. I haven’t used torrents for almost a decade, ever since getting a letter from my ISP about usage of those tracked ports. Fortunately streaming - yes I literally have a Netflix account, plus the occasional whatever - covers so very much ground, if not all, and for the tiniest fraction of the amount of effort involved in keeping up with things e.g. setting up and paying for a proxy. It’s literally as easy as searching for 1-2-3!:-P

Do you know any replacements for these btw?

Like Lemmy somewhat replaces “social media”, except I also used Facebook as a bit of a LinkedIn (b/c the latter was never good, it was instead always predatory), but people in general simply aren’t going to make an account on Lemmy, no matter how much you might wish that.

And Amazon, I basically don’t buy stuff anymore except from brick-and-morter stores these days - it’s like I’ve gone backwards two decades b/c you can’t trust anything online anymore! (maybe the online equivalent of the brick-and-morter I suppose)

For Google I use DuckDuckGo. Ironically AI is poised to somewhat clean up search results by putting those up top, except soon enough those will start to become monetized too, like you can have the “free” search results but if you want the AI-enhanced ones then you gotta poney up the dough, in a manner analogous to YouTube these days.

As for how all this happened, the story that I heard was that companies exploited legal loopholes wherein if they reinvested their profits into creating new ventures, they could effectively avoid paying a great deal of their taxes. Thus, like mushrooms beneath a forest, they grew and grew and grew and grew and now you cannot take one step without them lying underneath. Like how virtually the only competitor to iOS these days is Android, which at one point was an open-source project!!! They lay in wait, pretending to be a friend - maybe even thinking themselves that they were - until it was time to monetize, and then they pounced. Before YouTube, there were several other video hosting sites. But. Not. Anymore. They under-cut the competition, “donating” their profits from other enterprises into making them awesome, and now they own us, instead of the other way around. And now today, as you say, there are all these 10, 11, 12 minute videos (b/c there’s an incentivization to hit that “10” mark), out of something that would have worked far better as a 1-5 sentence text paragraph, so now you have to watch 10 minutes of unsearchable video to find the same information that 30 seconds of reading would have told you far better. Don’t get me wrong, SOME videos are freaking AMAZING! But most are total crap.

And… I do not know of a replacement for YouTube. Yes, I know of some other video hosting sites, some even grab YouTube videos directly, but nothing else comes even remotely close to allow a realistic comparion. e.g. Kursegat is AMAZING, and they put their videos onto YouTube, for their own monetization. I can bypass YouTube, but to watch what, not just go where?

And TV too as you said - there’s very little worth watching, see e.g. Stranger Things. Oh well, we all need to work our butts off anyway, to save up for the impending apocolypse or whatever.

At one point I literally walked away from a cushy job to try and help people (thankfully I got it back when that did not pan out), and do you know what I learned? That you cannot help people who refuse to be helped. Ignorance is trivially easy to cure (by comparison) - all it takes is knowledge. Whereas obstinancy… I do not know that there is a cure. MAYBE motivation, through personal pain unlocking a willingness to consider new possibilities that comfort previously made unnecessary? If so, then there is “hope” for us after all… b/c we are all about to suffer great pain as the internet, and in the wider view the enshittification of MANY areas of life, continue to get MUCH worse.

No matter who wins the next USA election. Though not equally.

I did not make it but I presume it is old yes, bc e.g. Amazon at one point used to have trustable reviews, but it’s been a minute since then!? I assume intent means production effort e.g. making things shared on Facebook takes seconds, whereas to shoot a porno takes at least minutes to hours. An alternate explanation could be to have intent be a surrogate for Web Traffic - although in that case, wouldn’t Facebook be much higher? Unless this is once again bc it is so old, prior to when it started taking over people’s lives e.g. games that stay-at-home mothers could play all throughout the day. Similarly, YouTube at one point looked poised to take over television itself back when the videos made were more of less simply using YouTube as another delivery vehicle, but they were funny as hell, or perhaps informative like a college class, etc. Now… I don’t know what happened, but TV sucks and YouTube sucks and we all merely look at memes, apparently.:-P

Anyway I liked how it shoved porn into only a single corner, as in it is high in one dimension but not all such, but for the rest of the details yeah it is too old to have any further relevance to modern society:-).

That is only one corner of it.

moonleay is already fairly cool - maybe use that!?:-P

Are you trying to say a comment from me, or from anyone? My last comment on Kbin was a week ago, and the one before that was three weeks ago. I will probably keep my Kbin account and just rarely if ever use it, as opposed to before where it was the only account I had.

Or if you mean anyone, the Kbin.social server is back up now, so yes it is functional. The owner does not communicate much but he works hard to keep it that way, it’s just that for whatever reason it has major issues, though it is up right now.

Not entirely, but neither is it extraordinarily healthy either. We’ll see what develops - e.g. maybe its creator will emerge from a binge of programming and it’ll become better than ever.

I still doubt that I’d go back after leaving it though - I waited so very long for it to improve, but it only ever seemed to get worse (performance wise), and it has major structual issues too, e.g. all final-say decisions controlled by a single owner who does not communicate much with the outside world.

In fairness, Kbin was not nearly as advanced as Lemmy when the Reddit protests and migration occurred, so a great deal of catching up was inevitably necessary.

A lot of people are leaving it due to the interruptions in service, but yeah it still exists.