On Reddit, Reddit would randomly pick 50/100 communities from which it fills your home feed. Your other subscriptions do not matter until Reddit decides to refresh the list of subs its pulling from.
In theory, if you’re subscribed to a bunch of inactive subreddits, your home feed is potentially being held back by these (since, as opposed to Reddit grabbing posts from 50 active communities, it’s only grabbing posts from - say - 30 active communities with the remaining 20 being inactive and taking up the spot of your other active subscriptions).
On Lemmy, is there any downside to retaining subscriptions to inactive communities?
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: There is no algorithm on Lemmy or Fediverse generally. The (edit:
localsubscribed) feed pulls from all communities you’re subscribed to. All sort options (new, active) don’t boost any community over any other*, so abandoned communities should have no effect on what you see in your feed - they simple won’t contribute to it, if you’re viewing recent content.
The exception is the “scaled” sort option, which boosts smaller communities, I believeThe local feed pulls from all communities you’re subscribed to.
Small correction: The subscribed feed pulls from all communities you’re subscribed to.
The local feed shows all posts from communities on your local instance, no matter if you’re subscribed to them or not.
Ty!
Scaled seems to favor newer content, so inactive communities won’t show up because there isn’t anything new to show. Scaled works better for low activity communities since they will show up when something does come up.
Takes longer to scroll the list if you want to visit one in particular, and can look a bit messy.
I’m not sure if there is any technical limitations on the number of communities someone can subscribe to
Nope, doesn’t hurt a thing, and can be a minor benefit if it’s inactive because it’s niche, since if someone else finds it, you’ll see any posts in your subscribed feed; likely faster than you would in the all feed, and a lot of people scroll subscribed first
It can give you the sads when you scroll past them
Yup, this is pretty much the only downside.
On Reddit, Reddit would randomly pick 50/100 communities from which it fills your home feed
Since when? Reddit must have gotten worse than I thought in the past couple of years…
That’s a very old feature
Huh. I don’t think I ever saw posts in my subscribed feed I hadn’t subscribed to…
I was talking about your subscribed subs, to clarify
What’s the difference between “subscribed feed” and “subscribed subs”?
One and the same - I was saying that I wasn’t suggesting what you thought I was suggesting, I was definitely talking about subscriptions. To clarify my question,
reddit.com home page generates posts from your subscriptions (the subreddits you’ve subscribed to).
It randomly selects 50 (or 100 if you pay) of your subscriptions and then populates the feed.
Hence the problem: if you subscribe to inactive subreddits, some of the 50 reddit selects are effectively duds; they’re not doing anything and are taking up spots that other active subreddits could have. Your home feed is therefore de-facto hindered if you subscribe to inactive subreddits.
I was wondering if this is also the case on Lemmy.
It randomly selects 50 (or 100 if you pay) of your subscriptions and then populates the feed
I was not aware that Reddit had a limit on the number of subs which appear in one’s subscribed feed. I’m not aware of any such limit on Lemmy, and would be surprised if it were as low as 50 (if a limit exists).
