I’d like to invite you all to share your thoughts and ideas about Lemmy. This feedback thread is a great place to do that, as it allows for easier discussions than Github thanks to the tree-like comment structure. This is also where the community is at.
Here’s how you can participate:
- Post one top-level comment per complaint or suggestion about Lemmy.
- Reply to comments with your own ideas or links to Github issues related to the complaints.
- Be specific and constructive. Avoid vague wishes and focus on specific issues that can be fixed.
- This thread is a chance for us to not only identify the biggest pain points but also work together to find the best solutions.
By creating this periodic post, we can:
- Track progress on issues raised in previous threads.
- See how many issues have been resolved over time.
- Gauge whether the developers are responsive to user feedback.
Your input may be valuable in helping prioritize development efforts and ensuring that Lemmy continues to meet the needs of its community. Let’s work together to make Lemmy even better!
It certainly doesn’t help that Lemmy had and still has absolutely no sensible way to actually surface niche communities to its subscribers. Unlike Reddit, it doesn’t weigh posts by their relative popularity within the community but only by total popularity/popularity within the instance. There’s also zero form of community grouping (like Reddit’s multireddits) - all of which effectively eliminates all niche communities from any sensible main view mode and floods those with shitty memes and even shittier politics only. This pretty much suffocated the initially enthusiastic niche tech communities I had subscribed to. They stood no chance to thrive and their untimely death was inevitable.
There are some very tepid attempts to remedy this in upcoming Lemmy builds, but I fear it’s too little too late.
I fear that Lemmy was simply nowhere near mature enough when it mattered and it has been slowly bleeding users and content ever since. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, though.
The “Top of All Time” lists on Lemmy are currently dominated by posts from the exodus period, potentially overshadowing excellent content from both before and after this event.
Unfortunately, none of the suggested solutions can be implemented as the required data hasn’t been tracked over time by the software.
Visibility-Based Ranking: Factor in how often a post is shown to users by tracking the number of times a post appears in users’ feeds and calculating an “engagement rate” by dividing votes by views. Rank “Top of All Time” posts using this engagement rate. This option cannot be implemented as the software does not keep track of post views or the number of times a post appears in users’ feeds.
Community-Specific Normalized Scoring: Adjust post scores based on each community’s monthly active user count at the time of posting. Unfortunately, this option cannot be implemented as the software does not keep track of the monthly active user count for each community over time.
Normalized Scoring: Adjust post scores based on the instance’s monthly active user count at the time of posting. However, this option cannot be implemented as the software does not keep track of the monthly active user count over time.
Over the past few days, I’ve witnessed a remarkable surge in the number of communities on browse.feddit.de. What started with 2k communities quickly grew to 4k, and now it has reached an astonishing 8k. While this exponential growth signifies a thriving platform, it also brings forth challenges such as increased fragmentation and the emergence of echo chambers. To tackle these issues, I propose the implementation of a Cross-Instance Automatic Multireddit feature within Lemmy. This feature aims to consolidate posts from communities with similar topics across all federated instances into a centralized location. By doing so, we can mitigate community fragmentation, counter the formation of echo chambers, and ultimately foster stronger community engagement. I welcome any insights or recommendations regarding the optimal implementation of this feature to ensure its effectiveness and success.
I think it’s because it’s just memes and also quite hard moderation and downvotes. It feels like a reddit clone that has the exact same mindset as reddit. I get annoyed when I see people being moderated for having an opinion that is not popular.
I saw a post being locked yesterday for asking about moderation. Doesn’t anyone else see the problem with that? Your channels rules are not more important than making people feel they can talk and express what’s on their mind.
I hate that so much. Stop treating people like they are just resources to moderate.
I don’t see much discussions. But I’m sure there is a few here and there.
This doesn’t sounds true. I see lots of non-memes posts everyday, which is even more prominent than the humoristic posts.
Yeah because first of all, content had to be spread out across 562826 different communities for no reason other than that reddit had lots of communities, after growing for many many years. It started with just a few.
Then 99% of those were created on Lemmy.world, and every new user was directed to sign up at Lemmy.world.
I guess a lot of people here are younger than me and didn’t experience forums, but we had like 30 forum channels. That was enough to talk about anything at all. And I believe it’s the same here, it would have been enough. And then all channels would have easy to find content.
It would be nice if communities that are similar enough could “share” a comment thread, so you don’t end up with comments scattered over many different communities for the same link. The mods could toggle something in the settings and say “This other community is good and we’ll be OK sharing posts with them”. You also wouldn’t have to explicitly crosspost.
Consolidated View:
- Create a “Consolidated Thread” view that aggregates comments from all related posts into a single, cohesive conversation.
- Provide an option to switch between individual instance views and the consolidated view.
Neat, thanks!
It might be helpful to be able to set default per community for something like this. For example, !dailygames@lemmy.zip, it would be a jumbled mess to have it be all in one thread
Thank you!!
User-Driven Linking:
- Allow users to suggest links between related posts, with a voting system to confirm relevance.
- Create a “Related Discussions” section for each post, populated by user suggestions.
I’ve used Lemmy for a while and just recently felt like I was missing a feature for the first time: I’d love if there was some kind of mod mail functionality. One of my posts was removed by a moderator and I wanted to ask why, but I obviously didn’t know which mod did it, so I just randomly messaged someone from the list. There should be a more “elegant” way to do this, like some kind of functionality that allows a user to send a message directly to the community or the moderation team itself.
Option for default comment sorting. you can change the default sort only for posts, but not for comments, comments always sorted by Hot, and you have to manually change it each time you open comments.
In Voyager you can set this up, but it would be useful in the webui as well.
My biggest issue is that when I post, I’m torn between sharing in the community of the largest instance or in the instance I prefer the most. Posting in the largest instance offers more visibility for my post, but it feels like I’m not supporting the instance I truly like. The communities are too fragmented.
I think “cross posting” but like as a symlink would be great for this - i.e. if you click on the post in either community, you see the same comments
Something like multireddits or Kbin collections would solve this, but it would still take a lot of effort to turn all similar communities into a single group. I really hope there is an automatic way to solve this.
Multicommunities have been funded: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_for_Lemmy
Feel free to crosspost! The entire point of the web is that it has connections.
It would be nice if there was a way to handle instance/user migrations. If an instance gets their domain name taken away, there’s no way AFAIK for the admin to say “Here’s our new location, with a verifiable signature”. Likewise there’s no way for a user AFAIK to move their account with a verifiable signature that the new one is still them. Ideally this could all happen automatically with signatures getting synced automatically and all that.
I’m sure it would be a lot of work and no idea if ActivityPub would get in the way, but it would give people a lot more assurance that they didn’t pick a server that will screw them over by going down.
no idea if ActivityPub would get in the way
It totally would. In ActivityPub, all objects (like users and posts) have an identifier that includes the domain name. For instance, your ID is
https://midwest.social/u/m_f
. That’s what identifies your user. There is no way to change an ID - the point of an ID is after all that it stays the same and still refers to the same entity. This is a pretty serious limitation of ActivityPub right now unfortunately.I wonder who was the idiot who made a persistent ID for identity reliant on a third party factor that can be trivially taken away.
Any plans for solving it that are known?
Not as far as I am aware - I don’t think you can really fix it within the protocol, i.e. without a breaking change. Then you may as well make a new protocol.
I think there’s a FEP that could (or fixes) this. To my understanding ID can be any URI, so there are better ways. I guess it’s hard because it would brake a lot of stuff or how mastodon is build.
Any FEP trying to fix this will be incompatible with existing instances, so I don’t really see how it’s gonna work.
Yeah, it sucks. But I think that at a certain point it will need to happen if we want to make ActivityPub better with better portability.
A mute community in addition to block community. There are communities i may not want to see in my feed, but I might want to look at them. Currently my only option is to block and then offi want to check them out i have to unblock.
One thing you can do there is to take advantage of federation and jump to an instance where you are not logged in, which will then display all of the comments. On the web UI, the multicolored Fediverse icon works fantastic for this purpose, as it will jump straight to the comment that you want to see (although the hidden ones would be below that, or perhaps you would rather go to the post itself).
e.g. for me, I am reading your comment at https://discuss.online/post/12642239/11643668, but the multicolored button would take me to https://sopuli.xyz/comment/12447782, which I do not have an account on hence nothing under that would be blocked for me there.
Yes, that will allow me to read the community, it will not allow me to interact/post/reply.
Oh absolutely that is correct - once you’ve “blocked” something, you cannot then interact with it later, as it is a rather hard cutoff. I suppose you want to see something like a “remove from my feed” - basically a “hide this community from me until I want it” - rather than an actual, full-on “block”. Which is notable then that e.g. a user block of an instance is even softer than that, allowing you to see and reply and receive replies from people (though you don’t get notifications for those, unless they specifically tag your username). So community blocks are harder than people would like, and instance ones are softer, so they really aren’t hitting the sweet spot in-between.:-)
Yes, I suppose I want that too - a “community hide” option, rather than full community block:-).
Yeah, hide community is better verbiage than mute.
Hopefully they’ll work on stuff like this - but I don’t know their prioritization.
I will suggest filtering, by term and by source URL. I think it would help customize individual feeds, making it easier and perhaps more comfortable navigating the news.
Example A: term filtering: This should be fairly obvious. Say I’m a Linux user who could care less about KDE. But people keep gushing over it in the Linux subs I subscribe to, and the damn developers keep pushing new releases that also get posted. Argh! Filter out posts (maybe even comments) that mention KDE, Bob’s your uncle. And I can still enjoy all those delicious GNOME posts. Definitely not a real world inspired scenario.
Example B: URL filtering: Simply(!) filtering out link posts by source URL. Not a fan of Fox News and/or WaPo? Filter out one site or the other by root URL, like
*.foxnews.com
or*.washingtonpost.com
. Me, I’d gladly filter out all and any YouTube links unseen by default. That’s a constant noise generator I could genuinely live without. But I digress.I hope the examples illustrate my point because I could clearly never explain a feature request succinctly nor to the point.
Reminds me of Custom Feeds
- Inspired by Firefish’s Antennas feature
- Similar to Reddit’s multireddit functionality
- Follow specific users, communities, and instances
- Include/exclude tags or keywords
- Choose post types (posts, comments, or both)
- Set custom feeds as default
Yeah, more or less right. On Mastodon I’m a heavy filter user, so loads of terms and hashtags just GTFO. I don’t see anything near that capability baked into Lemmy.
And I have to say, the more I think about it, the more important link source filtering is. Given how many posts are links to external sites I think it would be a great feature to sift out the chaff before you even have the chance to roll your eyes at it!
Show saved items in order they were saved, not original post date. If I come across and save something from 6 months ago, when I go back into saved items, it’s sorted way back i stead of being the first item in the sort list.
This was supposed to be fixed in a server update, but doesn’t seem to be.
Keyboard navigation. I know about https://github.com/vmavromatis/Lemmy-keyboard-navigation but it’s annoying that I have to use an addin/userscript for such a basic feature.
Actual functional user blocking. I don’t want users being able to see my comments and reply to them when I have blocked them and I was totally surprised when they did.
It’s concerning how this happened to you before…
Yep, and it wouldn’t be very far back in my history if you want to see it. My last comment in that convo started with “ugh”. I was talking about transgender issues with someone who was extremely argumentative and kept strawmanning my beliefs so I told them in no uncertain terms that I was done with the conversation and blocked them. Later I decided to unblock them and discovered that they had replied not only to that final comment continuing to tell me I’m a bad person for their strawman interpretation of what I said, but to another comment I made in a different thread.
So this person who is actively insulting me also has the ability to follow me around and continue insulting me, and blocking them just makes me unable to defend myself.
Did not read the entire thing, but I see that you were arguing with a Hexbear user. Here’s my tip for you: don’t try to get on trouble with people from hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, and lemmygrad.ml. I don’t want to generalise these instances, but there certainly are many delusional people around there. Stay safe.
I know about Hexbear and wanted to mention that it was a Hexbear user but this ironically happened just a moment after I made my own Hexbear account. I know some of the users there are extreme, particularly that user, but the community overall I find worth it.
That said I have to wonder what you mean when you say to avoid getting in trouble and to stay safe. Is there a history of people being harassed or harmed by those groups?
Yes, there actually is. Two examples that I can give on top of my head is one user who allegedly still gets some messages by someone complaining in a comment they made many months ago, on a chapotraphouse post, and there’s also the Fediseer page, that shows the instances that censored Hexbear and their reasons to why, which include harassments.