Please post one top-level comment per complaint about Lemmy. You can reply with ideas or links to existing GitHub issues that could address the complaints. This will help identify both common complaints and potential solutions.
I believe there are a large number of feature requests on Lemmy’s GitHub page, making it difficult for developers to prioritize what’s truly important to users. I propose creating a periodic post on Lemmy asking users to list their complaints and suggestions. This way, developers can better understand the community’s biggest pain points and focus their efforts accordingly. The goal is to provide constructive feedback so developers can prioritize the most pressing issues.
Please keep discussion productive and focused on specific problems you’ve encountered. Avoid vague complaints or feature wishes without justification for why they are important.
Here is a summary of all the complaints from the previous post from six months ago. It’s interesting to see how many issues have been solved and whether or not developers value user feedback.
spoiler
• Instance-agnostic links (links that don’t pull you into a different instance when clicked)
• Ability to group communities into a combined feed, similar to multireddits
• Front page algorithm shows too many posts from the same community in a row, including reposts
• Need to separate NSFW and NSFL posts
• Basic mod tools
• Proper cross-posting support
• Ability to view upvoted posts
• Post tagging/flairs and search by flair
• Better permalink handling for long comment chains
• Combine duplicate posts from different instances into one
• Allow filtering/blocking by regex patterns
• Avatar deletions not federating across instances
• Option to default to “Top” comment sort in settings
• Migration of profile (posts, comments, upvotes, favs, etc.) between instances
• Mixed feed combining subscribed/local/all based on custom ratios
• Categories of blocklists (language, NSFW, etc)
• Group crossposts to same post as one item
• Feedback for users waiting for admin approval
• Propose mixed feed merging subscribed/local/all feeds
• Ability to subscribe to small/niche communities easier
• Reduce duplicate crossposts showing up
• Scroll to top when clicking “Next” page
• User flair support
• Better language detection/defaults for communities
• Ability to subscribe to category “bundles” of similar meta-communities
• RSS feed support
• Option to turn off reply notifications
• Easier way to subscribe across instances
• Default to “Subscribed” view in community list
• Fix inbox permalinks not navigating properly
• API documentation in OpenAPI format
• Notification badges should update without refresh
• Single community mode for instances
• Reduce drive-by downvoting in small communities
• More powerful front page sorting algorithm
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Probably the userbase so far. Love the platform. The political stuff on here especially seems like it comes from people who’ve never been laid or been able to hold a serious conversation in public.
I think there’s a lot of self selection going on. Most people who migrated here did it based on principles (or a persecution complex), so of course they will have lots of political opinions, often extreme. Frankly, it’s getting a little tiring seeing it everywhere. Even on gaming subs it seems like every other post results in a discussion about the evils of capitalism.
Yeah I’m always glad that certain communities are thriving on here but they tend to bleed over into every single thread.
I find it most annoying when someone’s just casually venting and someone else comes in swinging. I get that it’s especially hard on the internet to tell if someone’s venting or looking for solutions.
Like at this point I think it’s safe to say everyone on Lemmy has seen the same pro Linux, fuck cars, and fuck capitalism posts a million times. I think we do without one post dogpiling on some poor dude if they’re like “man traffic sucked the big one today!”
So I don’t agree with fuck cars much. I do see their point and it’s valid but it doesn’t represent my views.
Am I gonna go on their sub and just argue? No. So you won’t notice me since I won’t be vocal about my opposing viewpoints.
Even on gaming subs it seems like every other post results in a discussion about the evils of capitalism.
I think it depends on community, I avoid all .ml ones for that reason. Don’t get me wrong, I could go on about evils of capitalism for hours if prompted but the real issue is that most of the user base is 13 years old either in their actual age or mentally so you’re seeing same performative cynicism over and over again. I’m also getting a feeling that over last 3-4 months it got much worse.
I’ve been really pleased with the feddit.uk community so far. It probably helps that a lot of us are geographically similar.
I agree, the issue isn’t that people here have the wrong political ideas, it’s that most post get pretty political.
Imo it’s best to keep those stuff on the political communities so people who are not in the mood at the moment can get a break.
They do seem to be confidently incorrect often.
Are they though? Lemmy is the only social media site they complains about big issues AND does something about it (we are self hosted).
People on lemmy actually put their money where their mouth is, imo that’s better than Reddit that complain and still use the platform and help it grow.
That’s the Internet as a whole.
The political ideas you can find on Reddit are much more diverse. There is usually at least some pushback against some of the most deranged statements.
What are some of these deranged statements?
Back in the day before the Reddit purge, you would find the most outlandishly wrong opinions in fringe sub Reddits.
You’re not wrong xD
Eh, really depends where you hang out. Problem is EVERYONE hangs out at like the same 4 or 5 places anymore. You gotta get real niche to dodge the bullshit.
Politics is always the worst communities because people are there to be little keyboard warriors and fight for their cause.
Lemmy becomes 100 times better if you don’t subscribe to politics.
I subscribe to very few communities and only browse my home feed. It’s been great so far.
100%
Had to use filters to block most of it out
This and also that Lemmy has a major left-wing bias. I’d gladly take more right wingers here to even it out a little. Not that social media represents real life anyway, but being on a left-left wing platform does distort one’s reality a little. There’s a lot of views that are mainstream here but which I almost never encounter in real life.
Lemmy doesn’t have a left-wing bias as much as it has a far-left and authoritarian bias. Though this heavily depends on instance. Continental European instances tend to be far more moderate than Anglo-dominated instances, probably because at least parts of continental Europe have actual experience with real socialism.
My only complaint is not enough people commenting on / interacting with posts. I’m guilty of it myself (I was also mostly a lurker on Reddit) so I’m not trying to blame anyone but Lemmy often feels like a ghost town.
I think it’s grown a massive amount in 6 months. Back then I would say that was true. But now? Most posts have plenty of comments. Each month the number of average posts grow. It’s gotten to the point that 50% of the time there are so many comments I don’t read them all. We’re getting there.
Its so weird for me sometimes seeing a post with 100+ upvotes and 0 comments. Happens more often than you would think
Even posts with 100 upvotes and zero comments have value. It’s a quick way for me to see what’s happening without having to check multiple sources. The comments are just a bonus.
I’m doing my part!
Next step is making a comment that’s more than just a meme.
Its not really a complaint, but more of a direction I hope we go with this.
I think we can do much MUCH better than reddit in terms of new features, and I don’t think ‘copying reddit’ is the way to go to guide development.
The number one I’m looking for: some kind of dynamic linking that is an improvement to cross posting.
Cross posting or repeated posting of the same news story was already an issue under Reddit, but the nature of the fediverse/ federated platforms is that a lot of the same shit gets posted over and over and over again. So some way to collapse or considate threads/ conversations around this; I think with the RSS feed nature of things it should be possible. Maybe its like a different style view or a bot we could add…
But spreading a conversation that might have generated 120+ comments into 16 threads of like 2-3 comments; it really breaks up the value of those conversations (which is more than the sum of its parts). In this way, the networked/ federated nature of the platform works against us.
So I dont know what the answer is, but in reddit we had megathreads. I think thats over kill. But it might be something to think about and ideate on, because spreading the conversation out inot many small threads really lowers the value of the individual conversations.
Third party mobile apps can also implement this, it doesn’t have to be done in Lemmy itself.
Lemmy lives to rip reddit to pieces and share any bad news about them.
I didn’t leave an ex to keep being reminded a out her. Just move on and share anything new.
I notice this much less frequently as time went on. Reddit had the same trend in Digg era.
I’ve found it pretty easy to avoid with a bit of curation but I understand they’re a “necessary” evil that comes with every major user migration.
This isn’t a problem of Lemmy itself in terms of the software, so I’m not sure it qualifies… But, I find that Lemmy still has the same problem of Reddit where if you say something that the majority of users disagree with, prepare to be torn apart in the comments. And I do not just mean by getting corrected on something you said being factually incorrect, I mean more of a “your opinion is wrong because…”
For example, any discussion revolving around Linux (and let me just prepend this by saying I am a Linux user), if you happen to prefer using Windows be prepared to be told all of the reasons why you have to use Linux instead. And that’s usually tame compared to what I’ve seen on other subjects.
Obviously there are cases where yeah, you absolutely deserve to be torn a new one in the extreme cases when someone is actually being truly vile, such as trying to advocate for the harm of someone/a group of people - but the “extremes” are not what I’m really referring to here.
I’ve blocked a lot of users that while I’ve had no interaction with them, I see how they are clearly engaging in, let’s just say, bad faith with others.
In terms of software-specific issues, I can’t say that I really have had a lot of problems with Lemmy itself as of recently. As an instance owner, I used to have a lot of weird (what seemingly appeared to be, at least) random federation issues, but I haven’t seen any federation problems in a while now. Though just today I swear I submitted a comment somewhere, and its just poof not there - not even locally, but I’m chalking that one up to something I’ve done (whether a misclick, or I’m just hallucinating as badly as an LLM) rather than an actual issue.
I agree that on a userbase level Lemmy has a Reddit problem, and from the list of previous complaints in OP it seems it reflects onto feature wishes. There is clearly a load of users who just want to continue their Reddit experience here, original userbase be damned.
The Reddit experience I guess isn’t platform specific.
Somehow I’m sure it correlates with the old “opinions and assholes” idiom, only with online communities there is something that encourages people to post their hairy, unwashed opinions without end.
The opinion monoculture is not specific to Lemmy. Most social platforms, and even real life social circles, live in bubbles.
The Internet anonymity combined with the upvote incentives only make the problem worse.
I agree with your complaint but I don’t see it as something that can be fixed. We can all do our part to engage civilly and respectfully with others, but it won’t be enough to change the culture.
You identified one way this could be fixed.
Remove or completely rethink voting.
It was a bad system on reddit and it’s worse system here. There is no guideline for how it should be used, so a downvote means anything from “your community showed up on the all feed and I don’t want to see it” to “I disagree with you” to “your behavior warrants a report but I’m lazy and this button is right here.”
It’s not clear what it’s supposed to be used for, even on reddit. And here it’s worse because moderators can see your upvotes/downvotes, so people rightly using it without any guidance are getting banned from communities for downvoting.
Removing it altogether and replacing it with a tagging system would be an interesting option. Communities could choose which tags are available, and users could apply them to comments. Maybe “helpful” or “propaganda” or “friendly” or “hard disagree” or whatever.
I want all the redditors. I just want them on a more open platform.
I absolutely did NOT leave reddit because of the users. I left because of the changes to the platform.
I love reddit users and lemmy users.
Too long didn’t read, welcome to the Internet
When I post that Americans have higher purchasing power than before the pandemic, my data is downvoted, while personal experiences are upvoted
Some of those exist already with 3rd party UIs. I’m the dev of Tesseract, and it supports these, specifically:
- Instance-agnostic links (links that don’t pull you into a different instance when clicked)
- Ability to group communities into a combined feed
- Basic mod tools (as good as they can get with the current limitations of the API)
- Better permalink handling for long comment chains (Takes you right to the comment vs parent)
- Combine duplicate posts from different instances into one (matches on post title and/or URL vs just URL with most UIs)
- Option to default to “Top” comment sort in settings
- Allow filtering/blocking by regex patterns (Can filter based on keyword, though I’m working on adding regex as a filtering option)
- Scroll to top when clicking “Next” page (not really an issue with Tesseract, but pains have been taken to make sure you land back where you left off when clicking into and back out of a post)
- Easier way to subscribe across instances (can browse other instances and automatically resolve unknown communities and subscribe)
- Notification badges should update without refresh
The rest are all great ideas, but need API support.
Not trying to plug my UI, specifically, but just using it as a reference for your wishlist. Those are all thing that can be done with the current API without waiting on Lemmy devs to add support. Granted, some of those would be better if the API were handling them versus the frontend, but I was working with what I had lol.
Nice! What made you decide to write it? Where can I find out which instances offer that UI?
What made you decide to write it?
Every lemmy ui had some major or minor thing that annoyed me. lol. Wish I had a better answer, but that’s basically it. Credit where it’s due, though. I forked a very early version of Photon to build it, so it’s not 100% me, but it definitely stands on its own now. Both projects have diverged quite a lot since that.
Where can I find out which instances offer that UI?
Not sure. DB0, Literature Cafe, Lemmy NSFW I know used to run it, but not sure if they still do or not. I discontinued it in December after some internal drama happened but have since revived the project. I’ve only released bugfixes to the main branch, but am working on a new release with some visual polish and some requested features.
You can host it yourself if you want and point it to any Lemmy instance. My instance uses it as the default UI, and it’s unlocked to allow connection to any.
I’m in the middle of a complete refactor and hope to have that out in the next few weeks.
Edit: Photon supports a lot of that, too, but not all of the stuff I listed. Lemmy World runs Photon at https://photon.lemmy.world . It’s nice, but I still prefer my spin on it :)
Nice, I’d seen you’d stopped a while ago but I’ll look at hosting it if it’s back alive.
I haven’t announced any new releases yet (just pushed bugfixes) but if you’re interested, keep an eye out for 1.3.0 in the next (ideally) 3-4 weeks. I’ve been adding a lot of polish and added Infinite Scroll which is something I didn’t really want to implement but was getting a lot of requests for. Now that I’ve got it added, I don’t hate it lol.
If you’re brave and want to self-host it, the “InfiniteScroll” branch is my “nightly” branch for 1.3.0.
Ever since reading about the challenge of deleting an image from your profile, a GUI for that. It should not only be an API call, not should you have to contact your instance admin to do it. It should be completely self-service from your profile page.
I can’t follow a user, only communities.
Similarly, it looks like a.gup.pe groups don’t work here even though they’re basically just communities
It tends to be a little slower than mainstream social media, but I don’t expect that to be comparable nor do I expect it to improve quickly.
The user base is too small.
Not enough people have left Reddit for it, mostly niche hobby groups. Which means sometimes I end up back on Reddit briefly to read something or more rarely post/reply.
Yeah but there’s not much you can do other than try to convince them to switch. I don’t understand why people still like being fucked by big corps but to each their own I guess
Right of the bat: lemmygrad, hexbear and .ml other than that lack of userbase, lack of interaction in certain communities. Also some good communites are hosted on .ml and some good users there so I can’t outright block that instance.
User and Post flairs. Post flairs is helpful to me (in reddit) when I want to find posts that are similar. Like having a flair named “Episode Discussions” for communities like !anime@ani.social can help me to go through anime episode discussions threads. This is just my own use case and there might be better use cases for post flair.
Filterable post flairs and instance-agnostic links are my two biggest wish list items that I think would go a long way to making that specific community much nicer (speaking as a mod).
yeah like i said above, post flairs might help !anime@ani.social and similar communities a lot. i used to go to the old episode discussion threads in r/anime to see what other people think about a particular episode if that episode is exceptionally good and flairs helped me to filter stuffs easily.
I stopped using Lemmy due to instances blocking each other. I wanted to view content from specific instances, but none of the instances between the most popular ones allowed me to see all the content. I had to create multiple accounts, which made navigating between them cumbersome. This experience was more frustrating for me than any issues I’ve encountered on Reddit. I believe users should have more freedom to choose the content they see without having to create their own instance or manage multiple accounts. I was hopeful that this would change with user instance blocking implementation, but I feel validated in my decision after seeing that it hasn’t.
Don’t lemm.ee and sh.itjust.works have a very low number of defederations?
Yep. I’m on lemm.ee and I don’t even think about what content I might be missing.
Imma check those out. Thanks. :D
Wow, is that part of the reason why my feed sucks so bad? Seeing the same kinda stuff over and over again? I think I understand both sides of this argument. We’ve got users who are complaining of having their experience restricted with means outside of their control. They feel that perhaps defederation is a heavy-handed approach to this issue when a scapel will do. i.e. blocking and muting.
Then, we have those who advocate for a safe fediverse and view defederation as a means to that end. Or likely, from a more pragmatic perspective, they want to protect their own local instances and communities. I’m sure they’re thinking, “Dislike these restrictions? Too bad, find another instance.” And finding a new instance would solve your issues, for the most part. This is a tough problem I can imagine, and it sure does make for a less streamlined experience.
Defederation goes against the spirit of the fediverse but for large instances like Lemmy.world I think it’s the only option. Otherwise they have to have tons of moderators working around the clock.
Instances shouldn’t grow too big in my opinion, because then you get problems such as these. But it seems it’s in human nature to want centralized services because it’s convenient.
This is also why I don’t think decentralized is the future of the web. People want one place to go. If it hides the decentralization under the surface, fine, but people want one place.
Lemmy.today is federating with 100% of the fediverse. It’s a small instance with about 90 daily users but that’s an advantage, not a downside.
If I want, I can go read what tankies are writing or any other thing that people want to be protected from. I just like to make my own decisions what I should read.
With Lemmy 19, users can block entire instances themselves also, so you can make sure you block whatever you don’t want to read yourself.
But I’m a techie with strong opinions about freedom online and all that. Most people don’t care. :)
Federating communities is a manual process so in smaller instances you don’t see as much content as in larger ones since there aren’t many users subscribing to external communities.
It’s enough with one user subscribing to a community to get it replicated to an instance. So there is more content than anyone can read already. :) Probably the top 500 communities are already being brought in. Just a guess, not sure if it’s possible to count them all.
I think the best solution to this is a way to migrate an account to another instance, which I’ve heard is in the works.
Indexing is a bitch. If I try to find this post again in the future I wouldn’t be able to find it. It was much easier to do so on reddit.
wut https://lemm.ee/search?creatorId=268890&q=indexing+is+a+bitch
/home/pineapplelover
Indexing is a bitch. If I try to find this post again in the future I wouldn’t be able to find it. It was much easier to do so on reddit.
Ah ok. I guess Eternity doesn’t scan for comments. I’ll probably search through the web ui more often then. Hope for it to be SEO in the future so I can find it through any search engine
Community name in post URL #875
Make post URLs more meaningful #2097Include the community name and post title in the URL for better readability and context when sharing links to posts. For example, instead of https://example.com/post/12345, use a format like https://example.com/community-name/post-title/12345.
I tried running my own instance. Got it setup, got an account, then started to follow communities. I couldn’t get it to work with lemmy world and done of the bigger instances. I gave up after a weekend. It’s unfortunate, the invites were stuck in pending for about a week or so.
I’m still using this server, but would like my own as that would ever do slightly help with this servers bandwidth.
It’s unfortunate, the invites were stuck in pending for about a week or so.
I think that was fixed a while back. Not sure what version, but I haven’t seen subscriptions stuck on pending for quite some time.
I’ll try it again when I have motivation. Personally I just get weekends to do this sort of things. And with work wanting overtime…yeah I’ll prob get around to it in 2025.
I feel that.
