I notice when I open the app if I don’t go to “all” communities then I just see the same posts for about 3-4 days (mostly). I go to the communities I subscribe to and see there are plenty of posts there that are much more recent with upvotes and activity that would have appeared at the top of my home feed in BoostForReddit.
I’m still getting the hang of Lemmy so I’m not sure if it’s something I’m doing wrong or just the nature of the beast right now because it’s a different algorithm than what’s on Reddit.
My issue, for example, I follow a lot of tech/software development related communities and if I go to “subscribed” all I see for the first probably 10 posts is [email protected] despite following many many other communities in my local instance and even other instances. I definitely like seeing [email protected] in my feed but would like to see more from other communities too but I am not sure if that’s something I can really control.
Also, sort of an adjacent question, what exactly is “local” supposed to be in Boost? From my understanding it should be only posts from communities in your local instance, correct? For me, local shows posts from many instances from my local ie programming.dev (the only one I have an account with) as well as lemmy.world, lemmy.ml etc etc.
I would love some feedback here as I work to make Lemmy my new Reddit. After Reddit officially killed BoostForReddit and other 3rd party apps again the other day I decided I was tired of finding workarounds to keep it alive and wanted to officially ditch reddit (with the exception of using Google to search reddit due to the huge archive of information there).
Thanks for any help!
Welcome! The first few days have some extra learning, but you’ll find that lots of people have mostly or entirely replaced Reddit here. My thoughts:
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Set your sort to ‘scaled’. I find that this gives me a nice mix of posts from large and small communities. I don’t quite remember which sorting option it was, but early on I was also dealing with an unchanging feed and the culprit was the sorting option.
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keep an eye out for other communities you’re interested in. There are fewer users on any particular community here, but its less of an issue if you subscribe to more places. [email protected] for example, you can subscribe to it to passively find out about other communities
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Yes local is supposed to show posts from your home instance’s communities only. I don’t have much use for it, but it can be useful on topic focussed instances.
Yeah the local thing is something I’d like to see working properly because I mostly used Reddit and now Lemmy for software/tech discourse since Reddit replaced IRC for me like 15yrs ago haha. I expected to only see stuff specifically relating to that via my local programming.dev instance but I’m getting more of a catch-all in there currently. Maybe I need to clear the app’s cache or something.
I’ll try the scaled sort, it seems to be the popular opinion here. Thank you!
Edit: I’m an idiot. I was confusing the users posting to these local (to me) communities with their home instance tags aka [email protected] or [email protected] as the instances I was seeing. So if I saw a post by [email protected] then I was incorrectly interpreting that as a post on lemmy.world. 🤦🏼♂️
Ah yes that makes sense! Yea definitely use whichever method works for you :)
I’m not sure if the local sort also includes non-local content that you’re subscribed to, but it should work great when starting out without any subscriptions. If you haven’t already, this tool is great for finding communities
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It might have something to do with how you have your feeds (Subscribed, Local, All, Communities, Users) sorted. I personally like ‘Hot’ and ‘Scaled’.
To change the sorting of the feed, go to the upper right corner.
To change the default sorting for all feeds, go to the sidebar, then Settings > General > Posts > Default sort.
To change the default sorting for one specific feed, go to your list of feeds in the bottom bar, then Edit subscriptions, then, for a specific feed, Default sort.
Thank you for this! I’ve used Boost for Reddit for years so you’d think I would have thought about this already haha. I really appreciate the thorough walkthrough! Hopefully it helps more people than just me!
I have my feed set to most recent posts, so it’s always fresh to me, but if I don’t see anything, then maybe nobody posted anything.
I have no idea why I didn’t think to adjust the sort and just relied on the category itself. Ugh. Thanks for pointing that out haha.
Any idea about the local category showing communities from non-local instances? Do you experience the same thing?
No problem at all
Welcome to Lemmy… there isn’t that much content. I have to take a few days off between visits and I still end up seeing most of the same shit I saw last time I was browsing.
What sort(ing) are you using? With “scaled” and being subscribed to a few bigger communities, that shouldnt be the case
