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 want something like that too, although it’s worth noting that the implementation corner-case details could be horrendous.
There’s got to be a better way to do cross posts. When people/bots crosspost, my “All” feed gets cluttered with multiple copies of the same post. Maybe something like a drop-down showing all the instances and communities it’s posted to.
Edited to fix autocorrect…
I don’t know if this was requested before but I really want there to be a way to see all comments throughout crossposted threads. It sucks that there are so many crossposts that have like 1-2 comments each. I want to see all discussion about a post at the same time.
Some apps will collapse those into a single post, but not all of them, and not all the time. It would be nice if that were better.
Dynamic Linking System:
- A system that automatically links related posts across different communities and instances.
- Allow users to see all related discussions in one place, regardless of where they were originally posted.
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.
Just fyi, since the mod log is public you can look up who removed your post.
Every time I’ve looked it just said “mod”, even though sometimes I’m pretty sure it’s been an admin.
The default Lemmy UI doesn’t show it I think. Voyager and Photon show the mod, not sure about other clients
It just says “mod” for me.
I just realized that the default Lemmy UI doesn’t show it. Photon shows it and Voyager to. There are probably more but I know those two show the mod.
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.
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.
On a related note, threads ought to be able to have the default sorting changed at least by a mod, if not by the user who posted them. For example, the recent hurricane megathreads ought to have been defaulting to sorting by new.
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.
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
I personally like distributing my posts between instances that I feel are trustworthy as it provides backup instances (thereby increasing the bus factor) which should cover the unfortunate situation of an instance shutting down.
Since we’re all federated I’m no longer forced to put all my eggs into 1 basket like reddit🤗
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.
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!
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.
You can use the Photon frontend instead.
Photon doesn’t exactly have keyboard navigation, i’ve been working on it though
I don’t see it mentioned, so maybe it’s not a popular thing, but the ability to tag a post. Often time this can be annoying, but it can help in filtering posts in certain types of communities.
What do you m mean by rage a post?
Serves me right for typing w/o my glasses on! I guess there could be a fun answer to what “raging a post” might entail, but I can’t think of one. Corrected.
There were several issues on GitHub regarding proposals on how to solve the low visibility of small instances. However, after the Scaled Sort was implemented, all those issues were closed, yet the problem persists. I continue to use Reddit the same as before because I primarily used it for niche communities, which are lacking here. The few times I’ve posted to a niche community here, I’ve either received no answers or been subject to drive-by downvotes, likely from users not even subscribed to the community. As a result, I now only post on Lemmy when the post is directed to a large community, and I use Reddit for the rest.
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.
I would love to be given a few minutes worth of grace to edit some minor spelling and/or grammar mistakes once I’ve hit the “post” button.
Has anyone suggested any feature related to word list filters? Like, blocking any community, comment, post or user with a certain term in their name/title?
That or tags or something, I’d love to be able to block sports/anime/AI “art” altogether without my blocklist being gigantic
Seems like there’s basically no effort to address disinformation. I love the idea of the fediverse, but I’ve never told a single person I use it in well over a year because I’d be embarrassed if they ever visited and saw some of the content that gets upvoted here.
I mean, Lemmy devs are tankies, who participate in misinformation sharing.
If you see some, report it. Some of us admins of other Lemmy instances take disinformation seriously.
Thank you for your efforts, I have so much respect for the people who are helping to build a healthy fediverse.
Literally had a Hexbear user double down advocating for violence towards America after I told them it’s not a constructive way to go about holding the leadership accountable.
Do you have examples?
Do you have Hexbear and the .ml instances blocked?
