From the Lemmy docs:
- Active (default): Calculates a rank based on the score and time of the latest comment, with decay over time
- Hot: Like active, but uses time when the post was published
My default is set to
- Scaled: Like hot, but gives a boost to less active communities
This is the newest sorting option, I think, and it helps me not miss posts from the smaller comms - particularly ones where people are asking a question and there’s been no engagement. Ideally I’d like to have Mastodon-style lists so I could have “quiet comms” or something and check them all every so often.
I will switch to new or top 6h/24h if I’ve been on recently and just want to see what’s fresh. Top all time or 1y if I’m looking at new-to-me comms so I can see what type of thing to expect from it.
The duplicate content thing is kinda impossible to solve perfectly. Some people will tell you it’s a feature, and it can be interesting to see the different instances’ comment sections (especially after moderation), but yeah it can be annoying to have your feed dominated by a few stories.
The default web front-end will merge crossposts, but won’t if they’re multiple posts to the same URL. I think some of the apps do have that deduplication as a feature, but I couldn’t tell you which.
I remember the same problem from my Reddit days, but there wasn’t generally so many similar, overlapping communities.