Lemmy User Feedback and Improvement Thread: Share Your Complaints, Suggestions, and Ideas

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.com or *.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.

Show saved items in order they were saved, not original post date. If I come across and save something from 6 months ago, when I go back into saved items, it's sorted way back i stead of being the first item in the sort list.

This was supposed to be fixed in a server update, but doesn't seem to be.

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.

Actual functional user blocking. I don't want users being able to see my comments and reply to them when I have blocked them and I was totally surprised when they did.

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.

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.

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.

Give Mods and Admins the ability to move posts to another community.

I think multi-communities (which have already been improved for funding) will push Lemmy forward big time. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818

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.

I would like to have the ability to follow a Lemmy user, in the sense of seeing their posts in unblocked communities.

Help promote longer discussions by using the sidebar to display comments initially sorted by "New". Give options to filter comments by Community, Local, Subscribed, Mod View or All.

We need an RSS feed for saved posts, but the Devs seem to think it would be a privacy issue. Now idk what kinda Fucked up porn They're saving on Lemmy but I just want to read the articles I save on here in my RSS reader.

I really wish Lemmy had tags like RES

Downvotes are an inherently unequal proposition, as they are now implemented. This allows everything from near and dear friends who respectfully disagree to randos with day-one accounts who don't even know what a community is all about, to brigading events organized in a larger community (possibly on Reddit or in Matrix or Discord or such). e.g. iirc I can user-block someone or even an entire instance, but in retaliation they can see my profile and downvote everything I have ever done, or have a bot do so within seconds of new material coming out. Which would affect its discoverability.

Potential solutions would be to make them no longer anonymous, and/or when you block a user or an instance then they can no longer downvote that content - just like a user-level defederation. As it is now, user-level blocks are extremely weak and even notifications can be delivered by simply tagging someone's username.

Suggestion: Easy account migration between instances

Imagine you register to Lemmy.world, but realize you're missing half the content because it comes from Hexbear or Lemmygrad users. Migrating to Lemmy.ml is a solution for this

The decentralized nature of Lemmy, while appealing in theory, creates significant frustration in practice due to widespread instance blocking. Finding an ideal instance becomes a daunting task, as users must navigate a complex web of inter-instance politics and restrictions. This challenge is further compounded for those who prioritize factors like low latency or specific content policies. Lemmy's architecture heavily favors instance-level configurations, leaving individual users with limited control over their experience. The only reliable solutions seem to be either hosting a personal instance—a technical hurdle for many—or simply hoping that your chosen instance's admins align with your preferences and don't block communities you enjoy. This politicking ultimately undermines the platform's potential.

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.

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?

Displaying profile bios more prominently and encouraging the display of them would help everyone know if the user shared links to their other accounts or other SNS links and whatnot

This would also help fellow moderators and admins know if the newly created user is a real admin/mod that created a duplicate account or is just an impersonator

Automatic OCR and filtering based on content in an image.

Would love to have more freedom with relation to reply notifications. Such as muting a comment or a post.

I believe there’s been github issues opened and closed for atleast the past year but it seems to not be a priority for the devs. If I had the disposible income to put a bounty on the feature I’d pay for it but well I’m poor as heck.

It seems when a user is blocked and comments on a thread, any comments under that are also blocked. It should only be blocking that user, not the thread?

We are currently missing the ability to report user accounts.

lemmy-ui: Highlighting some words blindly in inline code is really annoying. For example,

• systemctl --user cat emacs
• pactl load-module module-switch-on-connect

When I go to Lemmy, I'm not logged in until I click on a post to read, what's up with that? I used to stay logged in.

The one feature that I'd love to see IMO: make it so Lemmy doesn't require Javascript to work to even view the main page. Come on we are supposed to be recovering the good web times of the '90s, why do I need a react json vue left_pad framework to produce a list of items that can just be consistently delivered by a HTML <ul>?

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.

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The "Top of All Time" lists on Lemmy are currently dominated by posts from the exodus period, potentially overshadowing excellent content from both before and after this event.

Unfortunately, none of the suggested solutions can be implemented as the required data hasn't been tracked over time by the software.

Yeah because first of all, content had to be spread out across 562826 different communities for no reason other than that reddit had lots of communities, after growing for many many years. It started with just a few.

Then 99% of those were created on Lemmy.world, and every new user was directed to sign up at Lemmy.world.

I guess a lot of people here are younger than me and didn’t experience forums, but we had like 30 forum channels. That was enough to talk about anything at all. And I believe it’s the same here, it would have been enough. And then all channels would have easy to find content.

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Over the past few days, I’ve witnessed a remarkable surge in the number of communities on browse.feddit.de. What started with 2k communities quickly grew to 4k, and now it has reached an astonishing 8k. While this exponential growth signifies a thriving platform, it also brings forth challenges such as increased fragmentation and the emergence of echo chambers. To tackle these issues, I propose the implementation of a Cross-Instance Automatic Multireddit feature within Lemmy. This feature aims to consolidate posts from communities with similar topics across all federated instances into a centralized location. By doing so, we can mitigate community fragmentation, counter the formation of echo chambers, and ultimately foster stronger community engagement. I welcome any insights or recommendations regarding the optimal implementation of this feature to ensure its effectiveness and success.

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I think it’s because it’s just memes and also quite hard moderation and downvotes. It feels like a reddit clone that has the exact same mindset as reddit. I get annoyed when I see people being moderated for having an opinion that is not popular.

I saw a post being locked yesterday for asking about moderation. Doesn’t anyone else see the problem with that? Your channels rules are not more important than making people feel they can talk and express what’s on their mind.

I hate that so much. Stop treating people like they are just resources to moderate.

I don’t see much discussions. But I’m sure there is a few here and there.

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