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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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.
Yeah I’m always glad that certain communities are thriving on here but they tend to bleed over into every single thread.
I find it most annoying when someone’s just casually venting and someone else comes in swinging. I get that it’s especially hard on the internet to tell if someone’s venting or looking for solutions.
Like at this point I think it’s safe to say everyone on Lemmy has seen the same pro Linux, fuck cars, and fuck capitalism posts a million times. I think we do without one post dogpiling on some poor dude if they’re like “man traffic sucked the big one today!”
So I don’t agree with fuck cars much. I do see their point and it’s valid but it doesn’t represent my views.
Am I gonna go on their sub and just argue? No. So you won’t notice me since I won’t be vocal about my opposing viewpoints.
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
I agree, the issue isn’t that people here have the wrong political ideas, it’s that most post get pretty political.
Imo it’s best to keep those stuff on the political communities so people who are not in the mood at the moment can get a break.
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.
That’s the Internet as a whole.
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.
What are some of these deranged statements?
Back in the day before the Reddit purge, you would find the most outlandishly wrong opinions in fringe sub Reddits.
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.
You’re not wrong xD
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.
I subscribe to very few communities and only browse my home feed. It’s been great so far.
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.
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.
Most of the stuff I’m interested in has either no community or a dead one
Its so weird for me sometimes seeing a post with 100+ upvotes and 0 comments. Happens more often than you would think
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.
I’m doing my part!
Next step is making a comment that’s more than just a meme.
I think the same thing, and also guilty as well.
Yeah we actually have a pretty good number of posts and votes but not enough comments in them usually
I guess because people post about the niche they’re interested in, but there aren’t enough people to always find many others interested in it too
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.
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.
Alternatively community federation, such that a community can be spread over multiple servers.
I’m not sure I understand what that would look like or why you’d want that … ??
Like … sort of an alliance of communities on different instances that are discrete but, because they’ve chosen to “ally” with each other, can be interacted with in some unified way??
Yes something like that, it makes sense because Lemmy is distributed and there are several channels that cross post the same articles, I have no idea if it’s feasible.
Yea I think some more straight forward mechanisms could help there. Federating the alliance at a deep level is probably tricky. Some thoughts:
- Being able to view all the comments from the different cross posts or duplicate-link posts (which lemmy can automatically register). This has come up before, even in this comments section.
- Easily manageable multi-communities. Basically my idea, but making sure that they are easy to share, load, manipulate and view. For instance, your idea of “Allied communities” could be achieved to some extent by having these communities list in their side bar (or maybe some other convenient spot for this specific purpose) a suggested multi-community that contains the other allied communities. But, instead of just being a list, it’s some sort of link that takes you to a view of that multi-community, like any other feed, which you can then easily save to your list of multi-communities.
- If done along with cross-post comment merging, I’d say you pretty much get to your allied communities idea.
- Maybe there’d some way to combine the two where the “cross-post-comment-merging” mechanism is aware if you’re viewing through a multi-community and so automatically (depending on a setting probably) merges across communities in your multi-community, or at least presents a button for easily doing that.
All of that would be, I think, easier than some deeper addition to federation.
More generally, I think a lot of fediverse stuff comes down to just getting smarter with our clients where some helpful endpoints on the server can help but aren’t nearly as complex and don’t need to increase the complexity on the federation side of things.
Does ActivityPub even support this?
Probably not, and I have no idea how hard it would be to implement.
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.
Piefed has this, and it’s great!
They have multi communities!? Didn’t know!
Just had a brief look … they seem to be created by the admin and not user defined?
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.
I’ve found it pretty easy to avoid with a bit of curation but I understand they’re a “necessary” evil that comes with every major user migration.
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.
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.
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.
Too long didn’t read, welcome to the Internet
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.
When I post that Americans have higher purchasing power than before the pandemic, my data is downvoted, while personal experiences are upvoted
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
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
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?
What made you decide to write it?
Every lemmy ui had some major or minor thing that annoyed me. lol. Wish I had a better answer, but that’s basically it. Credit where it’s due, though. I forked a very early version of Photon to build it, so it’s not 100% me, but it definitely stands on its own now. Both projects have diverged quite a lot since that.
Where can I find out which instances offer that UI?
Not sure. DB0, Literature Cafe, Lemmy NSFW I know used to run it, but not sure if they still do or not. I discontinued it in December after some internal drama happened but have since revived the project. I’ve only released bugfixes to the main branch, but am working on a new release with some visual polish and some requested features.
You can host it yourself if you want and point it to any Lemmy instance. My instance uses it as the default UI, and it’s unlocked to allow connection to any.
I’m in the middle of a complete refactor and hope to have that out in the next few weeks.
Edit: Photon supports a lot of that, too, but not all of the stuff I listed. Lemmy World runs Photon at https://photon.lemmy.world . It’s nice, but I still prefer my spin on it :)
Nice, I’d seen you’d stopped a while ago but I’ll look at hosting it if it’s back alive.
I haven’t announced any new releases yet (just pushed bugfixes) but if you’re interested, keep an eye out for 1.3.0 in the next (ideally) 3-4 weeks. I’ve been adding a lot of polish and added Infinite Scroll which is something I didn’t really want to implement but was getting a lot of requests for. Now that I’ve got it added, I don’t hate it lol.
If you’re brave and want to self-host it, the “InfiniteScroll” branch is my “nightly” branch for 1.3.0.
Oh cool! I was trying to find if there was a Tesseract community, and instead I found the creator! I’m loving the client!
Is it posisble to contribute to it? I have a few thoughts as a UX person.
Thanks!
I do have a community for it, but it’s been a ghost town since last year (some internal drama put the project in limbo, and I only revived it a little over a month ago). Currently taking advantage of nobody expecting anything from me right now, lol, and taking time to do a big overhaul of a lot of stuff under the hood and add some needed polish to several areas. Hope to have 1.3.0 ready to release in the next 3-4 weeks (hopefully).
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !tesseract@dubvee.org
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.
Multiple communities with the same topic across multiple instances, gets kinda confusing and makes it harder to block ones you aren’t interested in
Especially when the same thing gets posted to all of them at once and the same post floods your front page.
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.
I can’t follow a user, only communities.
Similarly, it looks like a.gup.pe groups don’t work here even though they’re basically just communities
i would love Lemmy to act like Mastodon for users that opt in
I think it would be nice if same communities from different instances could be merged in same way. Like there are 2 android communities.
deleted by creator
Yeah okay, I meant if all communities want it of course. Just sometimes it leads to smaller communities that’s all
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.
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.
