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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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:
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.
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 https://iusearchlinux.fyi/post/5429432
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