Currently, this bot just subtracts yesterday’s subscriber count from today’s, and give a percentage difference.

Current Algo: percentage difference in subscribers, averaged over the past 7 days. Where it’s showing less than 7 days, it’s because I don’t yet have the data (mostly because this bot hasn’t run for 7 days yet, but also because either it’s a new community, or because I had to fudge things a bit in the first few days by excluding communities with less 100 subscribers)

Edit to add: since the posts from previous days will always be available, the first filter for each new day is now how much a Community has grown in that one day. That is then added to earlier day’s, and averaged out.
Previously, it was just showing the rolling-average for every Community, but that meant that sites that had had crazy growth in one day but had now plateaued were still showing up and the list wouldn’t change until that aberration had aged out.

Please use this post if you’d like share better ideas of what constitutes “trending”, and if you have any preferences for how the posts are displayed. Thanks.

  • counselwolf@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    The current algorithm may favor smaller communities (which is alright for now since most communities are small anyways).

    But in the future, maybe incorporating other metrics like

    • Absolute Growth = Today’s Count - Yesterday’s Count with the current metrics
    • Weighted Growth Score = (Absolute Growth * Daily Growth Rate) / 100

    might be better.

    • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      Yeah I was just gonna say, going from 1 sub to 10 the next day would make your community have 1000% growth lol. There may need to be some kind of scaling, or even a separate data sheet for purely by the numbers subscriber growth.

      • freamon@feddit.nlOPEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        This issue is currently fudged by excluding communities with less than 100 subscribers

    • freamon@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Thank you. I’ll re-assess the algo and incorporate people’s suggestions when I’ve got some more data to play with.

  • xkforce@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    Do that then calculate a rolling average for the week. To highlight communities that arent just growing that day but consistently over time. ie what a trend is

    • freamon@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Okay, thanks. I’ll do that when I’ve got a week’s worth of data.
      I honestly did try to search what “trending” was, technically, but it’s one of those terms where it’s difficult to get past the SEO stuff.

  • DisappointingIntro@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    I think splitting the post into sections dedicated to specific metrics might help. You could keep WIP metrics live but as different sections. For example…

    Top N By…

    Growth Percentage: <this would be your current metric> … … …

    Absolute Number of New Subscribers: <eg. trendingcommunites +5000 new subscribers> … … …

    Trending Formula (WIP) (Link to post detailing formula): <this is the formula talked about in a different comment> … … …

    Etc.

    I think that grabbing the easy metrics and offering them up initially will be more beneficial to growing your own subscriber count than trying to work out a clever way to do just the one thing.

    Love the idea though, I’ve posted about this community in a couple places and I’m thrilled to see that it’s taking off a bit. Great job!

    • freamon@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Thank you - for your support as well for for your suggestions.
      I’m realising that, given the raw data, there’s more I could be doing with it, both in terms of how accurate the results are, as well as how they are displayed.
      Now that I’ve got a few days worth, I’ll work on smoothing the daily bumps, to help distinguish between a genuine trend and incidental hiccup.
      After that, I’ll look into breaking things up - using different formulas to show different things (e.g. at the moment it’s probably impossible for a 30k subscriber count Community to ever show up here). There’s such a wide deviation in the data that it likely calls for it.

  • Zaphodquixote@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Fwiw, if the link isn’t in the post as an embedded url, it doesn’t show correctly in all apps. Usually, the ! Doesn’t register as being part of the link.

    Which is true in jerboa, so you’d think that the lemmy devs might have chosen a different standard for it lol

    • freamon@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      Okay, thanks. I changed the link format over, so maybe it’ll work better for apps users.

  • CoachDom@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Is it me or the posts in this community are disappearing?

    This morning I could see Trending Communities for Tuesday 11th July 2023, Trending Communities for Wednesday 12th July 2023 and this post.

    Right now it’s only the Tuesday’s roundup (and I can only write here because I had this tab already opened). The rest has disappeared.

    • freamon@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      There were a couple of mis-fires this morning that results in 2 deleted and 1 one new post for Wednesday.
      I’ve since re-written the bot to be more robust, so it shouldn’t happen again.
      I know other people can see the new one ('cos it has some upvotes), but if you can’t - and it can’t be solved by refreshing the page - then it might be a federation / Lemmy issue with how deleted posts are handled.

  • DarkSpectrum@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Hey, cool bot!

    When I click a community link from the trending post in the Connect app it gives me an error saying no user with that username. Is it because the ! is not included in the link?

    • freamon@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      The ‘!’ is in the links - there’s seems to be a Lemmy issue at the moment. For instance, clicking those links from New Communities wasn’t working for me from the Voyager app, and when I’ve tried to click some from this community from a web browser, the first attempt fails, and then only gets it on a refresh.

  • arkcom@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    Since lemmyverse supports kbin magazines, can your bot be made to include them as well?

    • freamon@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      It can yes. I’ll implement it in a few days when I’ve built up some comparative data to work with.

  • Vengefu1 Tuna@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been keeping up with the daily posts and I have a suggestion. I’ve noticed I mainly scan the list for the new additions since I’ve already checked the other communities on previous posts. It would make it easier for users like me if the new additions were grouped together in their own section, then we wouldn’t have to search through the whole list for the new additions. I’m not sure if others do this as well, but I wanted to throw it out there.

    • freamon@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I’ve been thinking along the same lines. The bot will catch up on its own missing data in a couple of days - so it’s won’t need to do the “over 7 days / over 6 days” biz. When everything is for over 7 days, I’ll start putting new entries at the top (with maybe just a single line, for previously mentioned stuff)

  • Manu@feddit.deEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Such a great bot! Does it only consider federated communities that have are listed on Feddit.nl? My Bass-related community !bassment@feddit.de is slowly but steadily growing (+30 subscribers in the last week) and it would be amazing to see it reach your ranking.