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The Hot timeline becomes stale if the lemmy server isn't restarted every 6 hours or so, which takes 10 seconds but can't be done on larger instances such as lemmy.world because it kills the queue of outgoing activity.
This is a known bug and is being worked on. For the time being you should try with "top 6 hours" and "top 12 hours" sorting.
I appreciate the sorting suggestion! I'll try that. I understand that Lemmy isn't as big as Reddit, but I swear there are more people than my feed is leading me to believe.
It's been hard to look at all these posts about how big lemmy is and how fast it's growing, to watch the scale-up issues, and keep in mind just how much smaller it still is than reddit. According to https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats the lemmyverse is just now closing in on 2M users (from 750k last month), but only 70,000 of them are "active." Reddit claims 50,000,000+ daily users and 400M monthly. That's essentially 1000x larger than lemmy - that's the difference between seeing your favorite band at a stadium concert or your local pub.
I'd be curious to see what the comment/post rate is for "active users" per platform.
It's an open secret that it's a very small percentage of users who engage in comments, and a MINISCULE fraction of a percent who post content... Tinier still the percentage of accounts that post the things that end up in the "all" feed. A boggling percentage of Reddit front page content comes from like, 100 user accounts.
The comment/post ratio for active users on Lemmy is 100%. An active user on Lemmy is defined as someone who has made a comment or post within the last month.
Then the solution becomes simple. Track those 100 power users and lure them here.
All of us reading this post feeling the same way can do our part by posting and commenting. If everyone who thinks they're the only ones here start talking the emptyness disappears
I'm definitely more active here than I am\was on reddit, and there's definitely less activity here... but I can accept that, just to get away from the firehose of nonsense that reddit has become.
If that's true it should really be stickied by am admin. That's crucial info.
Huh, I thought Lemmy was dying, posts are so stale.
That was my main reason for posting this question, to see if I'm alone in this site with just a bunch of bots posting. All these responses have given me hope!
I feel the same way and made a post about it yesterday that got hammered with downvotes.
Content aggregation is a WIP around here. Reddit had very similar issues in its early days. Give it time.
The amount of responses in this post have been extremely reassuring. I honestly just felt like I was using the site alone with a bunch of bots lol
It's a bit of both. No, the place isn't empty, but it's still not populated enough for content to aggregate as well as it does on Reddit.
Content aggregates based on how the users vote. The more votes there are, the more data the algorithm has to work with, the better it can sort content.
Think of it like a waterwheel. On Reddit, the water comes in like Niagra, that wheel can power a city. Here, it's like modestly sized, gentle river so you've got less to work with.
Simultaneously, the waterwheel here is still somewhat under construction, whereas Reddit's has been a well oiled machine for many years now.
In both cases, time will fix it. Just need a little patience.
Big companys dump millions into a perfect algo to milk engagement and ad views. Right now the priority seems to be security and stability before moving on to features. Lemmy blew up pretty much over night. Its going to take time and volunteers to improve.
Here is what I do. First, sort by Top Day to see what I missed. Then sort by Top 12 hours to reveal newer stuff. Then sort by Top 6 hours, Top 1 hour, any finally Sort by New until I run out of content. At that point, it's time to put down the phone and do something else.
I pretty much sort by new most of the time. There is less noise in the system right now so you do not have to wade through so much toxic BS. That also means that you actually run out of genuinely new content pretty quickly. Viewing new posts has some nice side effects in that comments get good engagement much more often and you get to have a real influence on whether something gains traction.
I try to comment on new a lot too. Even if it's nothing substantial I figure people are more likely to add something if there's already a comment. Someone could have a really interesting take but if they see 0 comments they might not even bother.
There's just not as many people here as there is on Reddit. Things will be slow for as long as we don't have large numbers. Best thing you can do to make things better is engage frequently and spread the good word of Lemmy
Thanks, I'll keep trying to do my part to grow my favorite communities on Lemmy.
I felt the same way, but it's mostly due to lemmy's still premature sorting algorithm. Sorting by New, Top Hour, or Top Six changed my experience drastically. There's still issues like posts having not enough involvement through comments, and duplicate posts from similar communities, but overall it's much better after about a month in.
I feel your pain! Sorting by Top 6 Hours is my current go to, mostly because I only scroll every few hours or so. Additionally, I start by scrolling through "Home" then transition to "All" if I feel like it. If you use the voyager app, there's a new function to hide read posts, which could be helpful to you, as well!
That "top 6 hours" tip is great, thanks for sharing
I've been preferring new or top X hours ago, then just choose the X for the last time you visited.
Okay, so here's my first problem with the Twitter rebrand
I'm just seeing a wall of the same crap about Reddit and Twitter most of the time. I need to learn it better, and I think the technology has room to grow. The userbase exploded, and a lot of people have their own ideas of how it should work.
My takes: 1. Lemmy is small yet, so, few content. 2. A lot of propaganda accounts. You need to block communities and users. 3. Once in a while a small community make it to the top, so you found about it and subscribe to it. 4. Little by little your feed gets better. 5. Human nature, you can't escape from it, you know, that quote about how stupid is the average person and so. 6 Accept the limitations and enjoy the platform. PS: I do like all the silly memes.
You're not going to like what I'm about to say.
You're part of the problem. You can fix it though.
Ready?
You need to make original content for the communities you are apart of and stop expecting others to provide you the conent you want. Because if that's what everyone did, then there would be absolutely nothing here.
That's just the way it is right now. There's not enough original content creators on Lemmy yet.
What does original content mean? It doesn't mean reposts from other websites. It doesn't mean articles from other websites. The original content was already posted by the writers of the articles, on the original website. It doesn't mean comments you make. My comment here isn't original content. It's a reaction.
Original content is something you make. You baked some sourdough bread? Post. You made a chair from wood? Post. You made something out of leather? Post. You took a nice photo? Post. You made some digital art? Post. You drew a sketch of a building? Post. You did "insert hobby"? Post. You're a collector of this niche thing? Post.
The truth is, original content can be hard and time-consuming. It takes a certain mind to want to post original content. If everyone here would make just one original content post, I think that would help make Lemmy a better social media site.
Be the change.
Your ~~rant~~ post is ill-placed, because I'm trying to do that. I've already posted and commented multiple posts in communities I enjoy trying to garner attention and content. But i'm also a busy person who's trying to live with a family, children, and a budding carreer. I understand I need to be a part of the community and I am doing more now than I ever have on Reddit.
EDIT: I also wanted to add that this post is not about me complaining about a lack of content, it was a misunderstanding of the sorting algorithm. After posting this, I got lots of very helpful advice to help me use Lemmy's sorting better and my enjoyment of Lemmy has improved immensly to the point of where my experience on Lemmy is no longer lame.
EDIT 2: I must have misread your post because it was not condesending, but more motivating. I appreciate the sentiment and redact the condesending part, but stand by the rest of what I've said. I deleted the entire second paragraph because I was defensive and wrong in its entirety. I appreciate the sentiment while affirming I am trying to contribute more while my life is still very busy. I apologize for getting defensive.
You're right, I didnt look at your profile. That was my mistake. My comment wasn't intended to be an attack on you. It was more of a generalization of a problem of Lemmy at the moment. I should have gone out of my way to look at your profile and to better phrase what I was saying so that you and others wouldn't feel as though I was making a personal attack. Sorry about making you feel attacked.
I commend your amazing apology. This is what makes this community better than Reddit.
I think what your post was getting at was valid, and I promide I will do my best to not be the reason Lemmy has a lack of content, i want to do my best to contribute! I don't think your intentions were wrong, and hope you continue to advocate for people to contribute.
This type of 'post or you're the problem' comment really gets on my nerves too. If no one replies, people won't post again, and if a sub is nothing but single posts no one's coming back.
It's great you're putting in the effort to post, and people should appreciate that. I'm autistic and I can't post. I can give incredibly detailed information in response to a post or a comment if it relates in any way to any of my special interests. And I do. And so do people like me. It's why you can find the answer to basically any question on the internet. These 'post more' people need to cool it, because the reason people like content like this is depth and engagement and it's not going to happen without people engagine with the content too.
Turn on “hide read post”! It changes everything
I did that and it confused the hell out of me, half of my instances communities were empty all of a sudden
Once clients add "mark read on scroll" this may go away, too.
I'm shocked you have had any discussions at all, quite frankly. Step outside of the some of these more visited subs and you see threads that are many days or weeks old with 0 replies. And lots of them at that. It doesn't make you want ot contribute because you know you won't get any replies either, so that kind of perpetuates the problem. You need a certain critical mass of visitors to a sub to get it going and sustain itself.
Also, I too have noticed that the same threads appear over and over again, days later. I can't imagine there is such little traffic that more posts aren't getting posted, but who knows.
I like to sort by top of the hour. Gives you recent posts that you can still engage with but is more filtered than "new".
What, you don't like all the crazy fury porn? Cuz I mean, if you don't like fury porn..... Ya there's a lot of it.
I have, thankfully, seemed to have avoided a lot of the furry porn. If you like it, more power to you! I'm thankful I can avoid that kind of content!
I feel you. Hot just doesn't work like it did on Reddit. I get swamped with posts from the most active communities and some old posts. It doesn't give me a nice spread of all my subbed communities like Reddit did. Also when browsing all it gave randomly showed me like 10 posts from some long nosed dog community. Did it twice so I blocked that community. Probably not on them, but just an issue with the Hot algorithm.