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
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
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
That’s the Internet as a whole.
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.
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.
people who’ve never been laid
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.
100%
Had to use filters to block most of it out
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.
How the people here think they’re so much different than Redditors.
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.
Multiple communities with the same topic across multiple instances, gets kinda confusing and makes it harder to block ones you aren’t interested in
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
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.
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.
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.
Its so weird for me sometimes seeing a post with 100+ upvotes and 0 comments. Happens more often than you would think
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.
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.
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.
Alternatively community federation, such that a community can be spread over multiple servers.
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.
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.
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.
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
I can’t follow a user, only communities.
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?
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 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
