The Hot timeline becomes stale if the lemmy server isn't restarted every 6 hours or so, which takes 10 seconds but can't be done on larger instances such as lemmy.world because it kills the queue of outgoing activity.

This is a known bug and is being worked on. For the time being you should try with "top 6 hours" and "top 12 hours" sorting.

You're doing Lemmy wrong, and it's not your fault. People keep saying "instance doesn't matter" - sure, you can interact with anything all over the main lemmyverse, but the best experience is to find a home server with a community that feels right. Subscriptions and the sorting will get there, but right now ALL (or maybe even local) is a way better experience

Here's the servers I checked out:

Lemmy.world

What I signed up on. The most people, the most content, civil community. Moderation is there, but you mostly feel it by the sense of civility. They keep getting targeted and they're experiencing a lot of hiccups, but they're the biggest source of content right now. Feels to me at this point

(Sh.itjust.works)[Https://sh.itjust.works/signup] About as close as you can get to freedom of speech while keeping out the aggressive bigots. I think one of their rules is along the lines of you can drop n-bombs or argue for whatever you want, but not use slurs against actual people. That says a lot... But they're great for shitposts and are experimenting with democracy at !agora@sh.itjust.works

(Beehaw.org)[beehaw.org/signup] I'd describe it as a safe space. Heavy moderation and curation of content. Those kinds of places feel uncomfortable and tense to me so I find it hard to give it a fair review. Not my thing, but they claim to be closest to Reddit... I'd give lemmy.world that title, but it was a big site and I was constantly searching out the medium sized subs.

(Lemmy.nsfw)[Lemmynsfw.com/signup] A stable server that will show you plenty of sfw content, and the community is welcoming. And of course, there's the obvious...

(Blahaj.zone)[https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/signup] The flip side of why I go to sh.itjust.works, lots of queer shitposts. I like the memes, I like the people, not so sure about the admin... She's been stirring up a lot of drama the last few days. Maybe there's more to it, I've mostly just seen her posts that look a bit power-trippy from a distance. I've also been waiting for that to happen to see how we as a community handle it, so

(pawbs.social)[https://pawbs.social/signup] This is my main home server now. A while back I came to realize furries are always big early adopters of every new tech, they're super welcoming, and they don't care if you're not a furry so long as you don't care that they are. I like the art anyways so it doesn't bother me. A lot of tech stuff too. They are most definitely furries though, and you'll see OwOs and all that comes with that. They're very chill, until someone isn't, so if you can't handle that you're going to have a bad time

(Lemmy.ml)[Lemmy.ml/signup] The original devs instance. They're going through some stuff with their domain and definitely anticapitalist, but after digging for evidence and talking to them they're far from extremists, but the constant stream of people heading over to there to pick a fight, the site was on edge when I went there a few weeks ago. A good place if you're into good faith debate on economic and governmental systems

lemmygrad.ml was a more extreme version (literally someone came in to start a fight in every thread i saw) they're understandably pretty wary. Their ideas are out there, but they're definitely not pro genocide and don't worship Stalin (at least as a whole).

Lemmy.ml I wouldn't pick until they get their domain issue shaken out, but I included them because after an afternoon trying to get to the bottom of it (the only proof of anything I found was a mastodon post about someone very vague about what was said and ending with "unfortunately the conversation was deleted"), so it seems to me they've been getting misrepresented. I'm very open to more concrete details though

(Dbzer0.com)[https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/signup] They sail the high seas. Less content, but what was there was pretty interesting if you're into tech, security, or digital rights

Those are the sites I remember off the top of my head after exploring around, there's >2k instances (although about 100 were populated by users when I went through the data dump a few weeks back)

If you're on Android, I'm doing bug fixes before launching my app very soon, and iPhone build is coming once I can get one to test on. I pushed back the launch to pack on features, I've got keyword filtering, you can explore servers without changing accounts, it saves your place, hides read posts, it offers URL replacement (I accidentally went to Twitter for possibly the last time today and YouTube yesterday, the logo change was worth it but nitter is less jarring).

You can interact with Lemmy links, collapse comments, post with a control bar that doesn't float around, save drafts, and it's all in a dark material-design style (but with way less cards). There's still a lot to be done, but after bug fixes and optimization v2 will be focused around combing feeds and accounts to get just the right mix. Eventually I've got eyes on pixelfed and maybe even things like friendica - the beauty of the fediverse is how amazing a foundation it is to build on

For today, there's still occasional bugs and jank, but at this point I can say it's pretty stable when the servers cooperate. I'll be covering for more and more of it through the client as time goes on, but for the last 2 weeks I've been using it exclusively. My friend convinced me I need to wrap it up and put it out there and get feedback, so

Check out !flemmy@lemmy.world if you're interested, I just posted some screenshots (it will get prettier, but hopefully it's good enough to not be distracting)

Content aggregation is a WIP around here. Reddit had very similar issues in its early days. Give it time.

Sort by 6 or 12 hours is super important.

Here is what I do. First, sort by Top Day to see what I missed. Then sort by Top 12 hours to reveal newer stuff. Then sort by Top 6 hours, Top 1 hour, any finally Sort by New until I run out of content. At that point, it's time to put down the phone and do something else.

There's just not as many people here as there is on Reddit. Things will be slow for as long as we don't have large numbers. Best thing you can do to make things better is engage frequently and spread the good word of Lemmy

I feel your pain! Sorting by Top 6 Hours is my current go to, mostly because I only scroll every few hours or so. Additionally, I start by scrolling through "Home" then transition to "All" if I feel like it. If you use the voyager app, there's a new function to hide read posts, which could be helpful to you, as well!

I've been preferring new or top X hours ago, then just choose the X for the last time you visited.

I felt the same way, but it's mostly due to lemmy's still premature sorting algorithm. Sorting by New, Top Hour, or Top Six changed my experience drastically. There's still issues like posts having not enough involvement through comments, and duplicate posts from similar communities, but overall it's much better after about a month in.

I'm just seeing a wall of the same crap about Reddit and Twitter most of the time. I need to learn it better, and I think the technology has room to grow. The userbase exploded, and a lot of people have their own ideas of how it should work.

My takes: 1. Lemmy is small yet, so, few content. 2. A lot of propaganda accounts. You need to block communities and users. 3. Once in a while a small community make it to the top, so you found about it and subscribe to it. 4. Little by little your feed gets better. 5. Human nature, you can't escape from it, you know, that quote about how stupid is the average person and so. 6 Accept the limitations and enjoy the platform. PS: I do like all the silly memes.

You're not going to like what I'm about to say.

You're part of the problem. You can fix it though.

Ready?

You need to make original content for the communities you are apart of and stop expecting others to provide you the conent you want. Because if that's what everyone did, then there would be absolutely nothing here.

That's just the way it is right now. There's not enough original content creators on Lemmy yet.

What does original content mean? It doesn't mean reposts from other websites. It doesn't mean articles from other websites. The original content was already posted by the writers of the articles, on the original website. It doesn't mean comments you make. My comment here isn't original content. It's a reaction.

Original content is something you make. You baked some sourdough bread? Post. You made a chair from wood? Post. You made something out of leather? Post. You took a nice photo? Post. You made some digital art? Post. You drew a sketch of a building? Post. You did "insert hobby"? Post. You're a collector of this niche thing? Post.

The truth is, original content can be hard and time-consuming. It takes a certain mind to want to post original content. If everyone here would make just one original content post, I think that would help make Lemmy a better social media site.

Be the change.

Sort by "best" is coming to Lemmy, in case you didn't know.

Once clients add "mark read on scroll" this may go away, too.

Turn on “hide read post”! It changes everything

I feel you. Hot just doesn't work like it did on Reddit. I get swamped with posts from the most active communities and some old posts. It doesn't give me a nice spread of all my subbed communities like Reddit did. Also when browsing all it gave randomly showed me like 10 posts from some long nosed dog community. Did it twice so I blocked that community. Probably not on them, but just an issue with the Hot algorithm.

I'm shocked you have had any discussions at all, quite frankly. Step outside of the some of these more visited subs and you see threads that are many days or weeks old with 0 replies. And lots of them at that. It doesn't make you want ot contribute because you know you won't get any replies either, so that kind of perpetuates the problem. You need a certain critical mass of visitors to a sub to get it going and sustain itself.

Also, I too have noticed that the same threads appear over and over again, days later. I can't imagine there is such little traffic that more posts aren't getting posted, but who knows.

I like to sort by top of the hour. Gives you recent posts that you can still engage with but is more filtered than "new".