No matter which sort you use (except for new), content is recommended to you by activity. Depending on the sort (active, hot, top) it uses a slightly different mixture of votes/comments/time since post to determine the order.
The only exception is scaled, which boosts a little bit midsized communities, but still doesn’t manage to improve visibility of niche ones.
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.
For example, if I upvote / comment often in a community, there should be an option to have posts from the community be boosted in my feed, even if it’s a tiny community.
Let’s say I’m subscribed to !world@lemmy.world and !news@lemmy.world because I want to occasionally see news. However, I’m also subscribed to a couple hundred other communities, some of them who don’t manage to get more than a couple upvotes on their biggest posts. And whenever I see them I’m replying/upvoting because I’m passionate about that topic.
My feed shouldn’t be 95% c/news and c/world because those are the most upvoted and commented. I shouldn’t have to scroll down hundreds of posts to find “big” posts in small communities I interact with at any opportunity I get.
That’s why I think it would be beneficial to lemmy if the sort/algorithm took into account your engagement in a way.
It doesn’t have to be complicated, you can have a single number “engagement score” for every community calculated with a basic formula, and that number is used as a boost to the community.
I’m aware that there are some examples of successful niche communities on lemmy. But that’s mainly because either a significant chunk of the lemmy userbase is into that niche (let’s face it the lemmy community is not a representative sample of the world population, we tend to be very similar people), or because the posts on it are simplified image/video type posts which appeal to people who don’t know much about the subject.
My solution to this (same experience here), was to block all the communities that were flooding with this stuff and anything else I didn’t care for, and then just browse All. Now my home feed is pretty nice.
Leftist into tech.
My feed got very overwhelmed by depressing relatable memes that, guess what, had leftist views expressed in the comments, and posts that were not politics but ended up getting into there anyways.
I might be leftist but damn if outrage and despair isn’t exhausting, I come to social media for fun, not to be angry and sad and hopeless.
Gave up on All incredibly quickly, only use Subscribed (I explicitly excluded anything political from Subscribed). So much less outrage and despair, so many more cute animals.
You can still use All, if you block the communities that you don’t want to see, one by one. It’s exhausting and new ones continue to be added, but otherwise it’s hard to know about new communities that come along that you might like.
So like I blocked !memes@lemmy.ml bc of its constant (seemingly not-entirely-joking) call for guillotining irl people including average people who simply were born in a capitalist nation, but subscribed to !tech_memes@lemmy.world that I enjoy much more now - the latter created only a few days ago, check it out!:-)
Also !fedimemes@feddit.uk. Really you miss so much only browsing by Subscribed. But do what works for you, bc I get it: the amount of extremist content on Lemmy is extremely high, and as you say depressing in its consistency.