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 issue with Lemmy’s “all feed” is that the largest or most popular instances tend to dominate what appears there, which undercuts the ability of users on niche or smaller instances to discover content truly relevant to their specific interests. This make different instances feel less distinct and reduces the value of joining a niche instance. This lack of meaningful, diverse niche content makes federation a moot point—if every instance is just a clone of the same meme and political noise, users gain nothing distinct from joining a smaller or niche instance, turning Lemmy into a less convenient, more fractured Reddit without the depth or polish users expect.
I use subscribed feeds, sorted by “scaled”. It pushes stuff from smaller communities I’m interested in up higher. Scaled doesn’t work that well on All though. It does mean I need to subscribe to things first, but I generally just subscribe to everything I’m interested in. I also browse All sorted by Top 6h regularly, to see what else is happening. Pretty good combo.
If you want to see smaller communities, sort by “Scaled”
If you REALLY want to browse All, try the “New Comments” sort, it’s like old forums
But I rarely look at All, mostly just Subscribed or Local
PieFed’s categories of communities / Topic areas does this. When I used Lemmy I never found anything remotely close to that, but perhaps the best was to (1) visit each and every community that you want to check up on individually, and/or (2) use New rather than Hot or Top… and then be prepared to block hundreds of communities that you never want to see content from, like sports or individual locations (cities, towns, stateships, regions, countries, etc.).
PieFed also combines all comments across all cross-posts, reversing the fragmentation effect from having too many communities split across many instances.
You all on Lemmy need to catch up!:-P
I think you might benefit from trying the “local” feed, which is just your home instance :)
It could perhaps be better communicated though, but I’m not sure what framing or label might make it more clear what local means for less technical folks
It might just be something people need to learn because the fediverse is a different thing than traditional social platforms. But I don’t think that possibility should stop us from improving clarity if we can think of a good way to do so :)
+100
The default “hot” sorting algorithm needs to prioritize smaller communities. Yes, I know we have new comments and scaled, but a classic UX principle is most users use the defaults.
Piefed has multicommunities https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list
Try All + scaled it order active posts and scales it so its not dominated by large communties… Also yeah its expected large communities will dominate an all inclusive feed. They product the most content and have the most users.
No, instead scaled sort makes the feed dominated by single users posting the same thing to 5 similar communities. Or a community’s single moderator posting 5 or 12 things at once to a community with no users
I find it far less helpful when browsing all.
Scaled is AMAZING for the Subscribed view, and this is my primary way of browsing Lemmy. But yea it’s pretty terrible for All
I hear you, but this is a problem that I’ve solved by browsing the splash as Posts/All/New. It helps to catch rando posts that I wouldn’t normally stumble across.
Allowing a user-configurable option to sort posts based solely on the current instance would address this by making the content feed more localized and personalized, helping each instance maintain its unique character and fostering community discovery without being overshadowed by larger instances.
That’s exactly what the Local feed is for.
If you don’t want All, don’t use All. Because All will give you All, not just Local. If you want Local, use Local.For me, the issue is the lack of an ability to view the local of a different instance.
I’m on Lemmy.World. You’re on Communick.News.
If I want to view the local on Communick.News, I can’t. I have to create an account there. And if I want to view the local on Lemmy.World I need to log out of your instance, and log in over here.
Now here’s the bigger issue. Lets say I can click a button, and now a home instance, and all its communities could be saved to a special drop down tab that replaces the local. Your instance is always the default, but the rest are alphabetically listed.
So now that solves that, but we run into the next issue.
What makes Communick.News different from Lemmy.World?
See, if I had a Lemmy.Nintendo instance, it could have 50 different communities of different Nintendo stuff.
Then you could have Lemmy.Linux and have all the linux communities.
And sure, it’s decentralized so maybe Linux.paradise also exists and has some of the same communities.
The idea isn’t to centralize the instances. The idea is to theme them.
Reddit did this with multi-reddits. PieFed does this with categories of communities, Topic areas that are user customizable and shareable. Lemmy does not do this readily, although Blaze managed it… by making 50 different accounts, one per instance.
If I want to view the local on Communick.News, I can’t. I have to create an account there. And if I want to view the local on Lemmy.World I need to log out of your instance, and log in over here.
you don’t actually need to logout/login, you can view them anonymously
even if you wanted to login to a different instance, you don’t need to logout of the previous one
although you’ll have to copy paste the post links to your own instance’s search bar in order to vote/comment
Now here’s the bigger issue. Lets say I can click a button, and now a home instance, and all its communities could be saved to a special drop down tab that replaces the local. Your instance is always the default, but the rest are alphabetically listed.
I don’t think I understand. You mean choose a local view of a different server? That would require every instance to duplicate everything on every other instance. Not possible.
What makes Communick.News different from Lemmy.World?
It’s a paid instance. I pay a subscription fee to ensure it won’t die do to lack of resources.
The idea isn’t to centralize the instances. The idea is to theme them.
What benefit would themed instances have. You can’t follow an instance…
Oh! That’s what your trying to do! You want to be able to see some logical grouping of related communities, and follow that! Now I get it.Yah. That’s not the way to do that. The “MultiReddit” concept is what you want for that. A shareable list of related communities. That’ll work regardless of what instance they are hosted on. Multi-communities are on the pre v1.0 list already
Sorting by Scaled, which by design puts emphasis on posts from smaller/less active communities, helps s lot.
I know it’s been said already and it’s not a perfect solution but for now it’s an under appreciated first step.
In my opinion scaled is pretty unusable as it just “balances” out the feed with obscure hentai and conspiracy posts with zero comments
Thanks for reaching out to the community. Here are mine.
- universal tagging (when you friend or follow a user, whatever they tag (comms or users) is shared with you until you unfollow them
- community aggregators. For big communities, merge crossposts automatically on bigger communities like !dataisbeautiful@lemmy.ml and !dataisbeautiful@lemmy.world and !dataisbeautiful@mander.xyz and !dataisbeautiful@lemmit.online
- better federated moderation. Notifications of mod actions not just on your own instance, but everywhere. When a post is deleted by a mod for a reason, include the OP in the mod message so you can rewrite or remove the offending part of the message and repost the essence. I can imagine lots of scenarios where devs/mods don’t think that’s a good idea, but some of us didn’t read all the rules and didn’t mean any offense.
- Deeper publicly available voting analytics (on post level first but also comment level would be good) when you click on […] next to the metadata, get a voting pie chart that shows which instance the upvotes and downvotes came from. Even an barebones analysis tool that checks if a disproportionate % of up or down votes came from an instance that is rather small or only recently federated.
- This may be client related, but push notifications on comments, mod actions and DMs would be nice too.
community aggregators. For big communities, merge crossposts automatically on bigger communities
PieFed does this
This post is about Lemmy however.
yea, but if Lemmy never adds a feature you really want, maybe we just switch to PieFed lol
the Lemmy devs are very much against merged comments
and they haven’t even seemed to notice this thread yet (Rimu did though!) and just closed a ton of issues as “won’t fix”, meanwhile Rimu responded in a similar thread for PieFed within 2 hours of it being posted https://piefed.social/comment/7335468
although Lemmy does show crossposts already and v1.0 will have multi-communities
the Lemmy devs are very much against merged comments
No? It was said it shouldn’t be done in the backend, a frontend or an alternative client can still do PieFed style comment listing.
the Lemmy devs are very much against merged comments
For good reason perhaps? It merges distinct communities together, making communities less distinct. Different communities can have different moderation and participation standards and norms. Merging them I feel is a bad idea.
At the moment we have a few famous examples of similar communities coexisting
- !android@lemdro.id vs !android@lemmy.world
- !movies@piefed.social vs !movies@lemmy.world
- !privacy@programming.dev , !privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com and !privacy@lemmy.world
- !buyeuropean@feddit.uk vs !buyfromeu@feddit.org vs !BuyFromEU@europe.pub
All of those communities have similar rules, there’s nothing distinguishing them (!privacy@lemmy.ml for instance is different) except that mods never bothered to agree on a single place
I don’t think this is a problem. If the communities are similar enough, one will eventually win and be the bigger and main one. If they are different enough, they can continue coexisting.
Those are examples of similar communities that will probably never merge. The Android ones have been coexisting for more than 2 years now, and none of them is "winning.
This gives https://lawsofux.com/choice-overload/ to new joiners
“Where should I post? Those two communities look the same, one has more active users but the other one has more subscribers. Well, this is too confusing, guess I’ll just go back to Reddit”
merging them completely is bad yes, but the way PieFed does it is nice, they have separate headers for the comments from each community
I personally still feel like this brings the communities too close.
I could see it causing clashes for very specific communities, maybe those could be manually disabled cause I can only think of very few
or the comments could be grouped by multicommunities
Holy crap am I glad someone piped up.
You know how much I don’t care about Toyota when I’m talking about Hyundai? You know much I really don’t care about piefed’s features when this is not about piefed?
Thank you.
I agree. And while it is amazing the features that rimu has added to piefed, I personally really like Sopuli, and its admin team. I do have a piefed account, and I use it. But Sopuli, and thereby lemmy, is my main instance.
- you can’t get a Toyota on top of your Huyndai in 5 minutes, you can create a Piefed account and import your Lemmy settings in 5 minutes
- a lot of people aren’t aware about Piefed, and how compatible it is with Lemmy
Personal labels/tags or whatever they are called for both users and communities would be awesome to have in the standard lemmy front end. I think some apps or other formats might have them, but I do like the default lemmy interface and they would be extremely handy to have saved by an account for personal reminders.
Some examples would be the ability to set personal reminders for uncommon rules on specific communities or who has good takes on some random topic. There are just so many of both and it can be hard to keep similarly named things straight.
For user tagging. see this . its implemented on the server side but not on the UI side. give it a thumbs up maybe it will help the developers prioritize it.
I would love a tagging standard. I have a lot on Sync, and while none are critical, it would be nice to be able to transfer them over to another app.
Piefed has flairs for both posts and users
The last time I checked the piefed layout options weren’t my thing, but I’ll give it another shot.
The ability to block posts by keyword would be nice. The ability to merge communities and have lemmy move the subscriptions over to the merged community, mastodon does something similar with moving accounts so it is possible.
PieFed has keyword filters and multicommunities
I think polls could be useful.
Piefed has polls
A multi-community feature that allows you to group communities into a single feed is urgently needed.
pretty sure Lemmy v1.0 will have that
Agreed. I want to be to join them together. The only real difficulty will be for comments. How do they get federated between different instances
Piefed has that https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list
Piefed has that https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list
Lemmy needs a hierarchy similar to Usenet, or a way to tag each c/ with keywords to make it easier for the user or client software to block huge swaths of topics the user is not interested in.
Examples: Memes. Sports. News. Politics. Entertainment. Music.
It would improve signal to noise ratio in the All feed, allowing users to find new content they are interested in, rather than simply 100 dupes of things they are not.
doesn’t PieFed do this?
I’ve been lurking in threads like this for 2+ years, and coding accordingly.
we can tell :) keep it up
The All feed is for All. If you don’t want All don’t use All.
It’s designed as a White List system, with subscriptions. You pick the things you want to see.
You’re asking for a Black List system, where you see everything accept what you don’t want. That only works while things are small. As they grow, Black Lists become much larger, and more difficult to manage. When you get to the point where their are tens of thousands of communities, and hundreds of thousands of posts every second, they become useless.
The All feed is useless because it’s the same meme or news story posted 100 times each day because everyone thinks they have to start their own sub for memes or news stories.
All->Top Hour
That’s where the good stuff is.
Or all -> hot.
Remotely open post, similar to remote follow
I think this would greatly reduce confusion for new users when they click a Lemmy link and end up on a different instance
That would require some kind of local client side software.
Some kind of browser extension.have you seen the “Subscribe from Remote Instance” feature that already exists in Lemmy?
Could be identical to this
You’d have manually enter your home instance on every site you visit. Super annoying. Not a solution.
it’s better than nothing, users get so confused currently when they see this
that message would be greatly improved if it said “or open this in your home instance by clicking here”
also if it uses a common input name (which it would because it’s the same Lemmy software) then your webbrowser would suggest/autocomplete it
also if it uses a common input name (which it would because it’s the same Lemmy software) then your webbrowser would suggest/autocomplete it
That’s exactly the local software I’m talking about! Now we’re on the same page. Rather than being a form, the local software could just detect and do it all seamlessly.
yea the web browser is local software lol
but really this feature should exist regardless of autocomplete, just to reduce user confusion, so people are aware of how this stuff works instead of trying to click the login link and then failing to login and making an angry Reddit post about it
the fact that it presents a link to solve the user’s problem means that the user will click on it, and currently Lemmy only shows the login link as the solution to the problem, so of course the users will click on that and then they’re lost
Rather than being a form, the local software could just detect and do it all seamlessly.
the web browser won’t grant access to cross domain storage
even if it did some people have multiple accounts, or may not have logged in on the current device yet, or might be browsing incognito/inprivate, so it would still have to be a form of some kind
Someone should really submit a patch to firefox and chromium for this honestly, this is pretty jank.
Mastodon does what @Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com is suggesting.
It’s better than the current solution.
Are you affiliated with the project? Because I don’t think the devs are tracking this post. You should contribute to the project itself: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
Either way there’s value in perspective from different audiences. Not everyone is going to make an account and post on github.
We need to remember how many users aren’t even registered to an instance.
Still, the post is worded as if it’s official and devs will be looking at this. That’s deceptive.
If it’s not, I’d rather take the time to post on Github instead of shouting into a space the devs will not see.
although that isn’t the place for random complains. Well laid out bug reports and feature requests, for sure though.
Requires Github (/Microsoft). Not good.
NSFW only filter. Flip the existing one, add that as radio button with the NSFW block.
JPEGXL(JXL) support.
While I would love this personally. I think this is still a bit of a browser support issue Etc. But yes jpeg XL please. Smaller size for similar fidelity as JPEG. Even lossless with transparencies much better sizes than PNG. Though I know there is traction on the PNG side again and they are talking of implementing something other than lzma compression. That’s still the future. Jpeg XL is here and now. Not As tied as webp is to a single company Period and not quite as esoteric as avif is.
This is more of a browser issue than a lemmy issue.
You can post a link to any image, it’d break for most people though.
how do I follow specific users?
Use Mastodon. Lemmy is built around topics, not people.
I feel as though I’m still missing something about Mastadon that others have absorbed and moved past. There was remarkably little content there, aside from the spam shotgunned into my feed by the few brand/city official accounts that I subbed to… What’s the appeal? I set it to display the rando posts, but it appeared to be literally that, random shitposting the way that people scream into the void of Twitter or Bluesky…
Yes exactly! It’s just like Twitter or Blusky. It’s 99.3% people just shouting into the void, without form or structure. You’re not confused.
Hashtags are pretty good.
They really aren’t.
They’re a user created workaround, attempting to fix the structure-less, findability problem. Twitter embraced and officially incorporated them, because they had no better solution that wasn’t completely rebuilding the entire system. They rightly new everybody would hate that.The point of twitter is (more like was at this point) to follow people.
They’re different formats completely, and one isn’t inherently better than the other.Agreed.
Until people started following hashtags. Then they were trying to be about more than just people, and doing it poorly. Kind of like wanting to subscribe to people on Lemmy. That’s not what it’s for, and just shouldn’t be an option, so people know that.
I never enjoyed Mastodon or Twitter either
but if you want to follow a person instead of a topic/community then you use Mastodon/Mbin/etc
That’s part of the problem, I can’t even begin to figure out who or what to follow. I’m not kidding about the part where I browsed the random feed; there was random K-pop stuff, ultra-local politics with no context, posts about random low-key mobile games, stream of thought… I’m literally at a complete loss about where to narrow my focus with that platform, it might as well be a hacked feed of every single cell phone DM/individual group chat messages (minus the smut). I can’t even figure out why I should give a fuck about it existing TBH, what am I supposed to do with this thing?
I think that just means the platform is not for you (or for me). If it was a good fit for you then you would have people that you want to follow.
Try hashtags.
Mbin and piefed would be better for that.
try Mbin https://joinmbin.org/
You’d want mastadon for that. Lemmy is for following communities. Someone could make their own community if they wanted something for just them.
PieFed has that
I’d like the ability to block users when I stumble over an imbecile while browsing, but I still need to see the blocked user’s comments in groups that I moderate.
At present, user blocks are absolute, and don’t take moderation into consideration. This means, since I moderate a group, I can’t block users. If I do, and they later post to the group I moderate, I won’t see their posts or comments.
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.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3100 - Co-hosting communities across instances (e.g. “sharding”)
I would like to be able to comment and vote on items on the modlog.
I’d just get banned from that too ;-)
