from PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com to fediverse@lemmy.world on 05 Apr 2024 23:24
https://reddthat.com/post/16777736
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
threaded - newest
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.
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.
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.
On my instance, I follow most of the biggest communities with a “seed account” to fill out the “all” feed. This seems to work pretty well.
Btw GitHub allows you to sort issues by number of thumbs ups, and I believe the devs use this
github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%…
github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues?q=is%3Aissue+…
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.
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.
Some of those exist already with 3rd party UIs. I’m the dev of Tesseract, and it supports these, specifically:
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?
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.
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 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.
Oh cool! I was trying to find if there was a Tesseract community, and instead I found the creator! I’m loving the client!
Is it posisble to contribute to it? I have a few thoughts as a UX person.
Thanks!
I do have a community for it, but it’s been a ghost town since last year (some internal drama put the project in limbo, and I only revived it a little over a month ago). Currently taking advantage of nobody expecting anything from me right now, lol, and taking time to do a big overhaul of a lot of stuff under the hood and add some needed polish to several areas. Hope to have 1.3.0 ready to release in the next 3-4 weeks (hopefully).
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !tesseract@dubvee.org
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.
Most of the stuff I’m interested in has either no community or a dead one
Its so weird for me sometimes seeing a post with 100+ upvotes and 0 comments. Happens more often than you would think
I’m doing my part!
Next step is making a comment that’s more than just a meme.
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 think the same thing, and also guilty as well.
Yeah we actually have a pretty good number of posts and votes but not enough comments in them usually
I guess because people post about the niche they’re interested in, but there aren’t enough people to always find many others interested in it too
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.
That’s the Internet as a whole.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s the common spaces / topic-based communities that are mostly affected by this so there’s no escaping this if you’re here for the news etc
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.
I’ve had people argue about a specific field I’ve been in for 20+ years and be dead wrong. So yes, often, as I said.
100%
Had to use filters to block most of it out
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.
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.
What if I told you the words right wing and left wing had only a marginal relevance in reality. Mind blowing I know.
That was unnecessary. I know that people with poor social skills have more trouble with romance, but implying that all virgins are socially inept is a harmful stereotype, luck is a big factor in finding relationships.
Not to mention that there are entire groups of people who abstain from sex for one reason or another, and that has nothing to do with political ideology or intensity of belief.
When I open https://reddthat.com/post/16777736 I get a big blob of json instead of a web page.
That on kbin ,*and mbin, if your post isn't on page 1 it won't go to your post if you're trying to reply to a notification.
*edit.
@ernest actually fixed this at one point but it broke again with the big changes last month. I'm thinking he will fix it again sooner or later.
The bug exists on mbin as well. (Kbin.run)
It's one of my big projects, in progress in this PR. I'm really happy with where I got it to recently. I'm not sure if it'll make it into 1.6.0, but it's what I'm currently working on.
That's awesome. I suppose I should look into lending a hand in the dev department.
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.
Merge comments from similar posts into a single view
Third party mobile apps can also implement this, it doesn’t have to be done in Lemmy itself.
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.
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.
Isn’t the first issue fixed with Scaled sorting?
Have you not checked scaled sort? It’s been around months and prioritises content in smaller communities over larger communities. Tie that with subscribed and you get exactly what is needed.
Yea I’ve been on scaled + subscribed as my default feed since it came out and haven’t looked back.
Interestingly, it’s one of those things that should get better the more people use it.
Oh, Ididn’t know this existed, THANK YOU! Love science memes but it was dominating all the weird niche communities I sub to
The Scaled sort on the Subscribed view, it’s essentially the same as the New sort.
It really isn’t. It inflates content from smaller communities.
New stuff in bigger communities won’t have as high a ranking.
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’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.
I notice this much less frequently as time went on. Reddit had the same trend in Digg era.
Too much socialism, not enough common sense.
I like Lemmy. My only complaint is that I have some other users that stalk my account, if they don’t like my comment on a particular post. They will go through my past comments and posts, to use that content in abusive remarks towards me. The same thing was happening on Reddit. The way they were typing made me think it was my estranged husband and some of his friends. They have been harassing me online for years. I don’t think the mods and developers can do much about that, though, unless they notice the IP addresses on the other users all come from the same area.
Anyway, I like Lemmy. For the most part, discussions seem more intellectual than the ones I have found on Reddit, lately. It just seems to draw a different crowd of people.
Doesn’t the “block user” feature solve this? Even if they say something you’d never see it once they’re blocked. Or are you saying they create new accounts for each new abusive post?
There was one time on Reddit, that I blocked a user, and then a new account appeared and harassed me. I think it might have been my spouse. I let it go, but I made an account on Lemmy and moved over here soon after that.
Some of the comments have been abusive remarks out of nowhere, like someone suddenly calling me a “Nazi”, or demanding that I prove I’m female. My husband is a white guy that typically only dated white girls in the past. His mom is from Germany. I might be experiencing harassment because he doesn’t have someone to sleep with now.
You’ve already been banned from two communities for being a Nazi troll, so maybe it’s not out of nowhere: lemmy.world/modlog?userId=6799954
Also, you recently came here because your Reddit account was recently suspended: www.reddit.com/user/DragonTangram88/
I’m not a Nazi troll. I’m not German and I’m not even antisemitic or racist. I didn’t say anything that was antisemitic or racist.
You can say that ’till you’re blue in the face, but the mods seem to disagree, and the modlog shows some of the racist & transmisic comments & posts you’ve made and the mods have removed.
Your account is only two weeks old, and 20 of your comments contain the word Nazi, often in the context of you claiming not to be one. And you keep pretending to misunderstand Nazism as a genetic trait instead of an ideology: lemmy.world/search?creatorId=6799954q=nazi
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.sdf.org/pictrs/image/44d85376-98e3-4bf9-a78b-58ec3b52beae.png">
.
She will tell you for the hundredth time that she was born in 1988 and is 35 going on 36. She’s pretty consistent in that claim.
CreatorID 6799954 now returns “unknown”, which I think means the user account was purged.
That’s good because if you let a Nazi into your bar, the next thing you know you have a Nazi bar.
That’s so weird. I write controversial stuff here all day every day and I’ve never had this happen to me. Not here and not on reddit either.
It is weird. The writing style, of the commenters who have verbally lashed out at me, seems to be the same in every abusive comment. Outside of social media, I have had strangers chase me out of job assignments by telling me that someone wants to shoot me. That’s been happening for about 3 years. Four years ago, someone hit me intentionally in a crosswalk and told me, “get up, it could have been worse.” Luckily, I had a witness who saw it happen, and he told the police that the driver appeared to have run me over intentionally. I didn’t even know the witness. He just saw the woman run me down in the crosswalk and heard what she said. If my husband didn’t send all of this after me, then some gang is after me.
Aren’t you paranoid?
.
This person is stalking me and digging through my account to find things to bully me about. This is the second time tonight that I have opened my inbox to find this user claiming they have dug through my account history.
Just block them? I block people all the time. It really makes for a better experience.
I thought I had. Why is that person still allowed to comment in reply to my comments?
I just checked. This user was already blocked by me.
Weird. I haven’t experienced that before.
Yeah going thru her post history left me with the impression that if everyone seems to have a problem with you then maybe you’re the problem.
Welp I tried to do it to you but looking at your post history you just seem chill
Profile Privacy Settings #4223: Allow users to control who can view their profile feed/activity, with options like public, visible only to friends/followers, or completely private.
Multi communities. They would be a big deal IMO. If you could have multiple saved into a list so that you could check different feeds depending on what you’re interested in, it would be much better. Combine that with the scaled sort (as well as the others), and you’re managing your feed very well IMO.
kbin currently has a "collections" feature which does this.
AFAICT, it’s been something on lemmy’s radar for a long while too. I get the sense the devs never worked out how they wanted to do it or maybe were a bit too ambitious in what they wanted from the feature and so it was kinda left by the way side, unfortunately. If I were to ever start contributing to lemmy it’d probably be the first thing I try to pick up.
Alternatively community federation, such that a community can be spread over multiple servers.
I’m not sure I understand what that would look like or why you’d want that … ??
Like … sort of an alliance of communities on different instances that are discrete but, because they’ve chosen to “ally” with each other, can be interacted with in some unified way??
Yes something like that, it makes sense because Lemmy is distributed and there are several channels that cross post the same articles, I have no idea if it’s feasible.
Yea I think some more straight forward mechanisms could help there. Federating the alliance at a deep level is probably tricky. Some thoughts:
All of that would be, I think, easier than some deeper addition to federation.
More generally, I think a lot of fediverse stuff comes down to just getting smarter with our clients where some helpful endpoints on the server can help but aren’t nearly as complex and don’t need to increase the complexity on the federation side of things.
Does ActivityPub even support this?
Probably not, and I have no idea how hard it would be to implement.
Allowing communities that are the same name across servers to “interfederate” would be interesting too, I’d like some way cut down in repeat posts in same community feeds from different servers.
Piefed has this, and it's great!
They have multi communities!? Didn’t know!
Just had a brief look … they seem to be created by the admin and not user defined?
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.
Nothing it’s a great.
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 lemm.ee/search?creatorId=268890&q=indexing+is+a+b…
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 #2097
The problem is sometimes I don’t know which community it’s from
I think I copied pasted that in there from one of the github issues. I didn’t mean to.
Hiding read posts means they’re now lost (when you’re logged in) if you didn’t save the link somewhere. Can’t find it after a day and now you have to check it on incognito.
But if you don’t hide posts you’ve already read, you end up with the same posts on your feed.
it’s a very small nitpick though. having new posts load every time I visit lets me see a lot of new content, I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
I hope some app devs can put up a section for “read posts” locally so instances aren’t overwhelmed.
I browse by top 12 hours and I don’t find a lot of repeats, without hiding. Although I don’t check constantly so 6 hours or less might be better for someone who does
Edit: lol@the downvotes without replying; what’s wrong with the comment
I had to toggle between show and hide read posts all the time for the same reason but I don’t think having a read posts section would be any simpler than toggling the setting.
I can’t move my comments and history with me to another instance; only my settings and subscriptions follow.Sublinks. You whine and make excuses but didn’t make pull requests with good code, and now you are trying to tank the largest instance. Very Spez move of you.
I want nothing to do with your casus belli
It was MASSIVELY disappointing to see .world go down the path of announcing the intentions of instability with unnecessary change. It was the single most damaging move possible for Lemmy all because of stupid people’s anti community politics and people that can’t figure out Rust as far as I can tell.
Why would asking for input on thinking about something be so disappointing
It was things said in the comments of that post and reading between the lines. I think the change is inevitable and already decided. The main active admin of .world is working on sublinks. That is enough for me to view time spent on building community on .world as a waste. If it was the other way around and they were coding in Rust and the Lemmy base was in js or whatever, maybe I’d think differently, but everything I’ve seen is a massive red flag saying sinking ship, or at least I’m on the wrong ship and regret the time spent there now. A lot of people left already. I have my other accounts, but had never made a .ml until recently in an attempt to start making sure communities were shared across larger instances, but I guess it was well timed to make the shift.
I don’t think the chosen language should matter that much, I’m just worried about the fragmentation of the contributors
duplicated work that could’ve just been done together, or as 3rd party tools that link to the base Lemmy database/API, or plugins/extensions eventually
It’s crazy when I see this super popular issues closed without completion by the main devs. It makes me feel like they don’t care at all about user feedback.
There was a submission made about how few people donate to the Devs. I asked about transparency and some links were given that show some things. I commented that it’s not as transparent as it seems at first glance and they responded that it’s fully transparent. I asked them to clarify but they decided to ignore me. I see why the Devs get criticism.
To implement this feature you’d either have to:
Either of these would be very susceptible to abuse. Giving bad actors a button to force instances to run hundreds, potentially thousands, of operations probably isn’t the best of ideas.
All I know about it is that Mastodon offers this feature and is one that users have requested in a few very popular issues.
Mastodon doesn’t move posts.
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.
When I post that Americans have higher purchasing power than before the pandemic, my data is downvoted, while personal experiences are upvoted
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
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 really like this idea! Life is not a binary, nor are opinions typically, so the method of expressing that opinion naturally doesn’t fit into a binary format a lá upvote/downvote.
Instead of upvote and downvote, there should be like 5-6 options to choose from.
And hell let’s take it even further and make it so there’s an option you can click with every post that breaks down the current numbers of each pie-chart and/or column-chart style. That to me would be awesome! And it would help facilitate informed voting, which is important in any kind of voting system, whether it be in politics or social media.
I don’t have any suggestions, just want to say thanks for making this stuff. It’s very cool.
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
i would love Lemmy to act like Mastodon for users that opt in
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
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.
Im aware that its likely more of an app issue, but Universal GIF and Video Standartification is a must at this point. There is literally nothing more annoying than that and I genuinely see it as Lemmys current biggest hurdle. We can’t be a proper site or competition to other simular sites if something like GIFs and Videos basically never work properly.
Upvote/downvote system turns content to a “popularity contest”.
There is no way to categorize content by " funny", “insightful”, " serious", “scientific”, " helpful", etc…
Steam is a good example of this done right, comments can be given Trophies, misskey does Emoji’s IIRC
Nuanced voting system
Or simply emoji based “reactions” like in most messaging platforms. This user friendly and immediately understandable system invites many ways to express how you feel about a comment. I think the community would eventually develop a sort of nuanced language to capture how we feel about a comment. Like “we all know what 🏴☠️ means.” But perhaps this is too abstract.
Vert good point
Decorating comments can stay off the platform, thanks. Comments should stand on their own.
Sure for comments but I thought they meant post
A pretty big flaw of downvotes is they’re often not used as a “this is incorrect” or “this doesn’t fit with the post” button, but as a “I don’t like you” button.
Flawlessly accurate, everyone seems to always work an angle, the current system has no way of navigating this reality.
Steam reviews are a spam ridden popularity contest if I have ever seen one. Steam reviews also have a “was this helpful” button where you can say yes or no.
I don’t disagree with having alternate “currencies” of votes, but the upvote-downvote system works well enough as it is. Yeah, the system breaks if everyone is idiots and votes stupidly, but I don’t reallly… know how you can solve that problem with software.
.
There’s too many AOL users.
.
Content moderation should be “opt-in”.
Each community should have overlapping moderation teams – the user can subscribe or unsubscribe to the " filters" those moderators create.
The user should be put at the middle of the world and the user should be given supreme authority over which blocklists, content filters they subscribe to the same as which communities.
They should be able to discriminate against users whose profiles contain various emojis or flags stating their affiliations should they so choose.
If the user wants to avoid content from evangelicals and activist groups they dislike they should be given the tools to hide posts from those people.
None of this should be decided for them, they should decide for themselves.
I wish they’d port reddit’s old multireddit feature over, and make those lists shareable.
The “front page” of most instances are not interesting to average people or to professionals (e.g. local gov that wants to go open source, like those switching to Mastodon).
Part is lemmy’s hot-sort is basically broken as a ranking, another part is bad language filters, another part is that major communities here (fediverse, Linux memes, star trek memes, science memes, etc) are off-putting to out-of-group people because of so many in-group jokes. Its a hard fix.
It’s missing a few features from RES, i opened issues about them , that should make using the platform a better experience. for example i would like to tag open source maintainers so i could prioritize helping them, or just people who contribute more to the community (that i can see i have given several upvotes to).
Also tbh some people here sound like russian or iranians propagandists or bots , if somebody writes something completely unreasonable (like making a terror group sound like the “good guys”) I would like to tag him so i could know which submissions to examine more carefully.
Also having something like a “superupvote” like in tildes.net where you can only give it once in a while (e.g. top post this hour/day/week/month/year/decade). Our information diet is very important, consuming content with great “mental nutrients” is a worthwhile goal.
I think it would be nice if same communities from different instances could be merged in same way. Like there are 2 android communities.
Join both?
I like alcohol. That doesn’t mean every bar should merge into one big bar. Sometimes, despite two identical themed bars serving the same drinks and having similar clientele, you can have a cracking time in one and a shit time in the other.
Sometimes, that’s due to the staff (or mods in terms of Lemmy), sometimes, that’s due to particularly fun customers being in that day, and sometimes it’s just your mood on the day.
Having multiple communities for the same topic is a feature, not a bug. It also prevents a community from being strangled by 1 or 2 bad mods as another community can be made in response. Unlike the Reddit model, where there is 1 community for 1 topic, and if it has bad mods, well, you’re shit out of luck.
Yeah okay, I meant if all communities want it of course. Just sometimes it leads to smaller communities that’s all
No organizational hierarchy like Usenet, and no tags or hashtags , so there’s no simple way to block huge swaths of content you’re not interested in — like sports, or politics.
.
The simple way is to show only the groups you have subscribed to.
But yes I do like Usenet’s organizational hierarchy.
The idea that it can be or should be a drop in reddit replacement for people who want to scroll an app while they take a shit. The most fun on Lemmy I have is with my community for vegan cooking that is self contained for the most part and something I couldn’t ever get off the ground for years on reddit. I think each community should be essentially hosted on its own instance with other instances being for user accounts and identity that can access the community. The front page of my instance would just be my single on topic community.
!veganhomecooks@lemmy.world
Ever since the Reddit exodus, so many people joined Lemmy who just assumes everyone lives in the US.
“My rent is only $----/mo”. In what currency? A lot of countries use $.
I noticed that sometimes comments asking “What currency?” or “What country?” gets downvoted even though the original post / comment isn’t obvious that they are talking specifically about US :(
The downvotes are from Americans. Remember that downvotes are not a measurement of correctness, it’s just popularity and there are more Americans here than any other country
Are there? I think they are just the loud ones (as usual).
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Multiple communities with the same topic across multiple instances, gets kinda confusing and makes it harder to block ones you aren’t interested in
This is biggest one for me
Especially when the same thing gets posted to all of them at once and the same post floods your front page.
Yes. If you’re subscribed to both, it should roll up posts with the same URL from similar communities (how does it know? Good question) into the same comment thread.
No complaints really but I’d take a native keyword blocker. (No apps for me, thanks.)
I know it comes with more users. But the default filter on Sync for Lemmy (Active) means I see the same post at the top of my feed for 2 days! Previously on Reddit that would change like the wind changes direction.
Sort by hot instead, active seems to purely go off of comments on sync.
I wouldn’t say hot is great either. Just testing now and the third post is a NSFW post that’s 43 minutes old, has 5 votes and 0 comments.
Top seems to work best for me but I do have to pick 24, 12 or 6 hour.
.
Better integration within the larger fediverse, mastodon, friendica, pixelfed, etc. This is a killer feature that none of the big walled gardens can have and will improve the amount of interactions we have (which is a big thing people keep comparing about) a lot.
Searchability is bad.
Growing a new community is hard. I wish people used lemmyverse more often.
Having a fully customizable feed algorithm would be a killer feature.
Try this lemy.lol/post/19638974
This certainly helps, but I think is not enough. If I go to the “All” feed, I get everything indiscriminately. I wish there was some in between mechanism. I don’t claim to have the answer.
This doesn’t address searchability also.
I may get flamed for this, but having having algorithmic recommendations would be good. The ones we’re used to suck because they’re designed to maximize metrics like engagement for advertisers, but it is entirely possible to have one that’s user focused and can be turned on/off as users wish. And it doesn’t have to be some super complicated thing out of the box
Feed Algorithms aren’t inherently wrong imo. The problem with typical feed algorithms is two things:
Stream’s discovery queue is a good counterexample: optional, doesn’t manipulate you or waste your time, and each item indicates why it’s been recommended (though in my case it all seems to be because they’re popular).
TBH it takes a LOT of blocking to finally start seeing the Tankies less. Threw me for a loop when I first started interacting with them, and I still find instances that I need to fully block in order to not have to deal with them
For me it’s the extremist left and right it’s had to block. It really is better without them
I’ve definitely seen the extreme end of the left side of the spectrum here, havent seen as much of the right here though, much less the extreme variant… and I’m glad about that
It’s mostly extremist left, I just threw in the right so I didn’t get downvoted lol
Fair! xD
When I create a Lemmy community it won’t be discoverable on other servers until someone on the server subscribes, how do you subscribe if you don’t even know it exists? I understand why posts are not sent to servers that have no subscribers of the community, but why doesn’t it at least send the name and description of the communities to other servers?
An issue for this has been filed github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951
For now, try this tool lemy.lol/post/19638974
Github has a way to mark things as important to users: users have to give the issues a thumbs up. No “+1”, no simple “this affects me too” comments, just a simple thumbs up on the issue. Then anybody can sort the issues by emotes.
Also, the amount of people complaining vs the amount of people actually willing to help is phenomenal. This is opensource software. You can contribute:
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
The Lemmy community is here not on GitHub, and discussions on GitHub issues without a threaded, tree-like structure suck.
IMO, it would be better if every github issue had a corresponding Lemmy thread. Or if this thread were about awareness that github exists and issues should be mentioned there. Users could use their github account to thumb up the issue on github and make non-tech comments on lemmy. Otherwise, using your thread is quite difficult. Put yourself in a dev’s shoes:
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
personally i think that there should be a way for communities in different instances to formally join each other in a way that sums up the subscribed and active users
How the people here think they’re so much different than Redditors.
Github issues are annoying that way. You could solve it by closing down “issues” and using discussions instead. People can up and downvote discussions, and you can see that from the listview, unlike with issues.
And you can have threaded conversations in discussions.
The big news/current affairs instances are characterized by autistic screeching that has only a passing relevance to the article posted. See iusearchlinux.fyi/post/5429432
You can take the commenter out of R*ddit…
One of the Major oddities I see of lemmy is how for different servers you use different user name/password/email. Just seems reduntant to me. But that is same with some other social media networks