I’d like to invite you all to share your thoughts and ideas about Lemmy. This feedback thread is a great place to do that, as it allows for easier discussions than Github thanks to the tree-like comment structure. This is also where the community is at.
Here’s how you can participate:
- Post one top-level comment per complaint or suggestion about Lemmy.
- Reply to comments with your own ideas or links to Github issues related to the complaints.
- Be specific and constructive. Avoid vague wishes and focus on specific issues that can be fixed.
- This thread is a chance for us to not only identify the biggest pain points but also work together to find the best solutions.
By creating this periodic post, we can:
- Track progress on issues raised in previous threads.
- See how many issues have been resolved over time.
- Gauge whether the developers are responsive to user feedback.
Your input may be valuable in helping prioritize development efforts and ensuring that Lemmy continues to meet the needs of its community. Let’s work together to make Lemmy even better!
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.
I’m not sure on the technical aspect but I think “instance blocking” should be an OPT-IN message sent to users of the instance. For example, say lemmy.world wanted to block lemmy.ml, hexbear, and reddthat. Each instance is added to a “Suggested blocked instance” setting in your profile and a message is sent to the user notifying them the opt-in option is available. Could have a whole list with descriptions besides the instances for why the suggested block option is there. Users would be informed with an actionable option and not automatically opted in. Could just be a toggle-able switch list in user settings.
Example 1: when one side wants to bully the other, but the latter does not wish this, how do you solve this problem? Defederation it is then.
Example 2: when someone claims that the Tiananmen Square massacre did actually happen, that user gets blocked from all communities, including those they have never heard of, on lemmy.ml. This is not so rare - and this is straight from the Lemmy developers themselves, i.e. a feature not a bug. It does no good to pretend otherwise.
Example 3: when people refuse to label their kiddie porn properly, others must label it for them, or risk getting into trouble themselves, bc regardless of what some other website chooses to host, the federation model says that if your instance federates with it, then it is content that you are sharing as well. Though actually, I find the Fediverse mostly friendly in how it labels NSFW content, yet it refuses to label toxicity in a like manner - e.g. the brigading attempts organized on hexbear against other communities on different instances. If only a label could be affixed to Chapotraphouse, like “beware ye who choose to enter here…”:-).
I find your comment extremely biased towards your own POV and desires, but overall there is much more subtlety and nuance in interpersonal connections, e.g. sometimes women choose the bear, and rather than say that it is “silly”, it might behoove people to listen to why that choice may have been made?
I agree, one thing that should be available when choosing an instance is to be able to easily tell the blocks from instances.
Also, IMHO, 90% of instance blocks are childish drama. Lots of instances with the same world view block each other because of admins fighting, and this problem is not exclusive to Lemmy, all activitypub platforms suffer from it.
The ideal model would be instances be more tolerable and use instance block as last resort only for SPAM or Crimes. And the user itself ban what they don’t want to see.
Automatic OCR and filtering based on content in an image.
There’s got to be a better way to do cross posts. When people/bots crosspost, my “All” feed gets cluttered work multiple copies of the same post. Maybe sometime like a drop-down showing all the instances and communities it’s posted to.
Dynamic Linking System:
- A system that automatically links related posts across different communities and instances.
- Allow users to see all related discussions in one place, regardless of where they were originally posted.
I don’t know if this was requested before but I really want there to be a way to see all comments throughout crossposted threads. It sucks that there are so many crossposts that have like 1-2 comments each. I want to see all discussion about a post at the same time.
Some apps will collapse those into a single post, but not all of them, and not all the time. It would be nice if that were better.
My biggest issue is that when I post, I’m torn between posting in the community from the largest instance or from the instance I like the most. Communities are too fragmented.
Something like multireddits or Kbin collections would solve this, but it would still take a lot of effort to turn all similar communities into a single group. Hopefully, someone has come up with an automatic way to solve this.
Multicommunities have been funded: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_for_Lemmy
I think “cross posting” but like as a symlink would be great for this - i.e. if you click on the post in either community, you see the same comments
I personally like distributing my posts between instances that I feel are trustworthy as it provides backup instances (thereby increasing the bus factor) which should cover the unfortunate situation of an instance shutting down.
Since we’re all federated I’m no longer forced to put all my eggs into 1 basket like reddit🤗
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.
Give Mods and Admins the ability to move posts to another community.
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.
One thing you can do there is to take advantage of federation and jump to an instance where you are not logged in, which will then display all of the comments. On the web UI, the multicolored Fediverse icon works fantastic for this purpose, as it will jump straight to the comment that you want to see (although the hidden ones would be below that, or perhaps you would rather go to the post itself).
e.g. for me, I am reading your comment at https://discuss.online/post/12642239/11643668, but the multicolored button would take me to https://sopuli.xyz/comment/12447782, which I do not have an account on hence nothing under that would be blocked for me there.
Yes, that will allow me to read the community, it will not allow me to interact/post/reply.
Oh absolutely that is correct - once you’ve “blocked” something, you cannot then interact with it later, as it is a rather hard cutoff. I suppose you want to see something like a “remove from my feed” - basically a “hide this community from me until I want it” - rather than an actual, full-on “block”. Which is notable then that e.g. a user block of an instance is even softer than that, allowing you to see and reply and receive replies from people (though you don’t get notifications for those, unless they specifically tag your username). So community blocks are harder than people would like, and instance ones are softer, so they really aren’t hitting the sweet spot in-between.:-)
Yes, I suppose I want that too - a “community hide” option, rather than full community block:-).
Yeah, hide community is better verbiage than mute.
Hopefully they’ll work on stuff like this - but I don’t know their prioritization.
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 would like to have the ability to follow a Lemmy user, in the sense of seeing their posts in unblocked communities.
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
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.
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?
That or tags or something, I’d love to be able to block sports/anime/AI “art” altogether without my blocklist being gigantic
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.
I mean, Lemmy devs are tankies, who participate in misinformation sharing.
If you see some, report it. Some of us admins of other Lemmy instances take disinformation seriously.
Does a report go to the instance’s admin?
It goes to the mods and to the admins of either the reporting user’s instance or the instance of the user being reported.
So whenever a lemmings.world user reports something, I know about it and whenever something by a lemmings.world user is reported, I know about it as well.
I personally don’t moderate content that breaks community rules, I think that’s the mods responsibility/privilege, but if it breaks instance rules, I deal with the comment/post/pm myself. Some of the other admins I know moderate the same way.
Literally had a Hexbear user double down advocating for violence towards America after I told them it’s not a constructive way to go about holding the leadership accountable.
Thank you for your efforts, I have so much respect for the people who are helping to build a healthy fediverse.
Do you have examples?
Do you have Hexbear and the .ml instances blocked?
Hexbear yes, ml no
I don’t see it mentioned, so maybe it’s not a popular thing, but the ability to rage a post. Often time this can be annoying, but it can help in filtering posts in certain types of communities.
What do you m mean by rage a post?
Serves me right for typing w/o my glasses on! I guess there could be a fun answer to what “raging a post” might entail, but I can’t think of one. Corrected.
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 want something like that too, although it’s worth noting that the implementation corner-case details could be horrendous.
Neat, thanks!
It might be helpful to be able to set default per community for something like this. For example, !dailygames@lemmy.zip, it would be a jumbled mess to have it be all in one thread
User-Driven Linking:
- Allow users to suggest links between related posts, with a voting system to confirm relevance.
- Create a “Related Discussions” section for each post, populated by user suggestions.
