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 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.comor*.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.
I think multi-communities (which have already been improved for funding) will push Lemmy forward big time. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
Give Mods and Admins the ability to move posts to another community.
Help promote longer discussions by using the sidebar to display comments initially sorted by “New”. Give options to filter comments by Community, Local, Subscribed, Mod View or All.
We need an RSS feed for saved posts, but the Devs seem to think it would be a privacy issue. Now idk what kinda Fucked up porn They’re saving on Lemmy but I just want to read the articles I save on here in my RSS reader.
Just implemented it for fun on my instance (lemmings.world). Sadly you need to be a user of that instance for it to work. When logged in you go to https://lemmings.world/rss/init, afterwards a link is shown (among other information) that looks something like
https://lemmings.world/rss/4e6490fe0613f6e2e03cd420f71df14476e769b57604652921c1a7b2150f0888- that is your personal RSS feed of stuff you saved with a URL that cannot be guessed automatically (the hash is entirely random).It could be made to work for all instances, but that would take me a while. You can also ask the admins to install the app on their website (it’s open source and can be found at https://github.com/RikudouSage/LemmyPersonalRss).
Cool feature!
I think by default bots should not be allowed anywhere. But if that’s a bridge too far, then their use should have to be regularly justified and explained to communities. Maybe it should even be a rule that their full code has to be released on a regular basis, so users can review it themselves and be sure nothing fishy is going on. I’m specifically thinking of the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot (I know, I harp on it too much). It’s basically a spammer bot at this point, cluttering up our feeds even when it can’t figure out the source, and providing bad and inaccurate information when it can. And mods refuse to answer for it.
Even large social media platforms have trouble dealing with bots, and with AI advancements, these bots will become more intelligent. It feels like a hopeless task to address. While you could implement rules, you would likely only eliminate the obvious bots that are meant to be helpful. There may be more sophisticated bots attempting to manipulate votes, which are more difficult to detect, especially on a federated platform.
For sure, it’s not an easy problem to address. But I’m not willing to give up on it just yet. Bad actors will always find a way to break the rules and go under the radar, but we should be making new rules and working to improve these platforms in good faith, with the assumption that most people want healthy communities that follow the rules.
I’m particularly concerned about the potential for automods to become a problem on Lemmy, especially if it gains popularity like Reddit. I believe a Discourse-style trust level system could be a better approach for Lemmy’s moderation, but instead of rewarding “positive contributions,” which often leads to karma farming, the system should primarily recognize user engagement based on time spent on the platform and reading content. Users would gradually earn privileges based on their consistent presence and understanding of the community’s culture, rather than their ability to game the system or create popular content. This approach would naturally distribute moderation responsibilities among seasoned users who are genuinely invested in the community, helping to maintain a healthier balance between user freedom and community standards, and reducing the reliance on bot-driven moderation and arbitrary rule enforcement that often plagues many Reddit communities.
That’s a very cool concept. I’d definitely be willing to participate in a platform that has that kind of trust system baked in, as long as it respected my privacy and couldn’t broadcast how much time I spend on specific things etc. Instance owners would also potentially get access to some incredibly personal and lucrative user data, so protections would have to be strict. But I guess there are a lot of ways to get at positive user engagement in a non-invasive way. I think it could solve a lot of current and potential problems. I wish I was confident the majority of users would be into it, but I’m not so sure.
