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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There’s too many Redditors 😅
There’s too many AOL users.
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
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 with 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.
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
You can take the commenter out of R*ddit…
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.
How the people here think they’re so much different than Redditors.
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 https://lemm.ee/search?creatorId=268890&q=indexing+is+a+bitch
/home/pineapplelover
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.
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 #2097Include the community name and post title in the URL for better readability and context when sharing links to posts. For example, instead of https://example.com/post/12345, use a format like https://example.com/community-name/post-title/12345.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don’t lemm.ee and sh.itjust.works have a very low number of defederations?
Imma check those out. Thanks. :D
Yep. I’m on lemm.ee and I don’t even think about what content I might be missing.
I don’t have any suggestions, just want to say thanks for making this stuff. It’s very cool.
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
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.
Especially when the same thing gets posted to all of them at once and the same post floods your front page.
No complaints really but I’d take a native keyword blocker. (No apps for me, thanks.)
personally i think that there should be a way for communities to formally join each other in a way that sums up the subscribed and active users
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.
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.
Too long didn’t read, welcome to the Internet
When I post that Americans have higher purchasing power than before the pandemic, my data is downvoted, while personal experiences are upvoted
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 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.
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.
