Right now, big communities dominate the feed. I’m wondering what sort algorithm could level the field so niche or hobbyist communities have a fair chance to get seen.

There’s a good related post: Niche Communities won't be able to reach their true potential until Lemmy adds a sort that takes engagement into account. It puts it well:

“If Lemmy is to truly start having active hobbyist communities instead of being 95% lefty US politics, Shitposts, and some tech stuff, it needs a sort that takes into account the user’s engagement.”

What do you think should be the default sort for a more balanced Lemmy?

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[–] PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com 12 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

            
              Compute raw post score (upvotes minus downvotes).
Normalize score by community size (e.g., divide by square root of active users).
Calculate z-score relative to community mean and standard deviation.
Apply time decay to prioritize recent posts.
Sort posts by adjusted z-score.

Outcome: Posts that significantly outperform their community norm appear prominently, giving small and large communities equal visibility potential.
Enhancements: Minimum engagement thresholds, Bayesian shrinkage for small communities.

[–] trajekolus@piefed.social 15 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I'm not sure how Scaled is determined, but as far as I know, it is made for what you want

[–] PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com 12 points 5 days ago

Nah it only rewards communities with few members, that means bot communities with lot of posts and almost no active users are always going to be top. That's not the outliers sorting that I want.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 5 points 5 days ago

That's an interesting algorithm!

IMO the Lemmy scaled sort would be ok if it wasn't as powerful.

Try the scaled sort on PieFed.social, the amplification isn't as strong and I just tweaked it to filter out bot posts.

https://piefed.social/home/scaled/all