Perhaps there should be a new default feed that only features posts from communities that ‘x’ number of users have a subscription to, with ‘x’ being scalable with userbase. Also the aggregate user’s community subscription count could be used to influence the sort order for that feed and bring more popular content closer to the top. Of course there will still be diverseness amongst users in even the smallest userbase, but maintaining a blacklist of communities against a feed curated by user subscriptions would surely be easier than maintaining a blacklist against the raw feed from other instances.
One thing I worry about is finding new communities. If I understand correctly the federated feed only shows posts from communities that other users have previously searched for? If so that leaves new community discovery solely up to word of mouth or searching using external websites. Perhaps each lemmy instance could ask it’s peers for a list of their top subscribed communities from their instance by the users on that instance, and then start pulling posts from those top communities and adding them to the ‘all’ version of the federated feed. That should give existing and new users a (hopefully) mostly decent feed of the top communities from other instances to find content and communities from.
Perhaps there should be a new default feed that only features posts from communities that ‘x’ number of users have a subscription to, with ‘x’ being scalable with userbase. Also the aggregate user’s community subscription count could be used to influence the sort order for that feed and bring more popular content closer to the top. Of course there will still be diverseness amongst users in even the smallest userbase, but maintaining a blacklist of communities against a feed curated by user subscriptions would surely be easier than maintaining a blacklist against the raw feed from other instances.
One thing I worry about is finding new communities. If I understand correctly the federated feed only shows posts from communities that other users have previously searched for? If so that leaves new community discovery solely up to word of mouth or searching using external websites. Perhaps each lemmy instance could ask it’s peers for a list of their top subscribed communities from their instance by the users on that instance, and then start pulling posts from those top communities and adding them to the ‘all’ version of the federated feed. That should give existing and new users a (hopefully) mostly decent feed of the top communities from other instances to find content and communities from.