All is nice but I haven’t figured out a sorting setting I like there yet.

Sorting by new shows a lot of lower quality posts.

Sorting by most votes is dominated by bigger communities.

Using aggregator bots would allow for custom sorting without forcing it on everyone.

Exactly, this could also allow adding new ‘sortings’ like ‘sort by new’ or ‘sort by likes’ without having to add them to the apps/website.

As an example, the algorithm could try to highlight outstanding posts of smaller communities that otherwise might get overshadowed if simply filtering by most likes in all.

A simple bot could implement this by looking at the average range of likes in a community and then show posts that are significantly above that range.

If you are not convinced that’s a good idea, no problem you can just ignore that bot and use a different one or use none at all.

Thanks! I completely missed that, I don’t know how exactly it works but it looks really good for now.

I personally would have liked if the apps/website start out with all/hot for new users so they have a easier time finding communities worth joining, but I guess that’s down to personal preference.

Maybe custom bots are still viable for more advanced stuff but I could not think of any use case right now.

It would be pretty similar but more flexible, because the algorithm for choosing what to show can be more complex.

As an example, suppose a smaller community usually has usually posts which average 1-5 likes. If there was now a post that recieves let’s say 30 likes, that would be a very good post in context of the community but when looking at at the top of all it would possibly be overshadowed by bigger communities with higher average likes.

This custom aggregation of posts could allow to highlight such ‘high quality’ posts of smaller communities.

This is just an example, the actual selection could be more intricate.