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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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
Decorating comments can stay off the platform, thanks. Comments should stand on their own.
Sure for comments but I thought they meant post
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
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.
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.
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 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.
Btw GitHub allows you to sort issues by number of thumbs ups, and I believe the devs use this
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
100%
Had to use filters to block most of it out
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.
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.
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.
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.
You’re not wrong xD
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
It certainly doesn’t help that Lemmy had and still has absolutely no sensible way to actually surface niche communities to its subscribers. Unlike Reddit, it doesn’t weigh posts by their relative popularity within the community but only by total popularity/popularity within the instance. There’s also zero form of community grouping (like Reddit’s multireddits) - all of which effectively eliminates all niche communities from any sensible main view mode and floods those with shitty memes and even shittier politics only. This pretty much suffocated the initially enthusiastic niche tech communities I had subscribed to. They stood no chance to thrive and their untimely death was inevitable.
There are some very tepid attempts to remedy this in upcoming Lemmy builds, but I fear it’s too little too late.
I fear that Lemmy was simply nowhere near mature enough when it mattered and it has been slowly bleeding users and content ever since. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, though.
@PurpleTentacle@sh.itjust.works https://sh.itjust.works/comment/4451602
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.
The Scaled sort on the Subscribed view, it’s essentially the same as the New sort.
Oh, Ididn’t know this existed, THANK YOU! Love science memes but it was dominating all the weird niche communities I sub to
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.
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.
