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!
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.
Requires Github (/Microsoft). Not good.
although that isn’t the place for random complains. Well laid out bug reports and feature requests, for sure though.
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. 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.
Use a different software then? Federation is a core aim of lemmy, what’s the point complaining about it?
Or alternatively, perhaps present some kind of alternative solution that you think would deal with this problem as you see it…
a different software
When software is used as a noun, it’s a mass noun and not countable. This is like “a email”, which is as wrong as “y’all” in a wedding vow.
Is this written by Ai?
There were several issues on GitHub regarding proposals on how to solve the low visibility of small instances. However, after the Scaled Sort was implemented, all those issues were closed, yet the problem persists. I continue to use Reddit the same as before because I primarily used it for niche communities, which are lacking here. The few times I’ve posted to a niche community here, I’ve either received no answers or been subject to drive-by downvotes, likely from users not even subscribed to the community. As a result, I now only post on Lemmy when the post is directed to a large community, and I use Reddit for the rest.
I’m not really sure this is a software issue, if anything Lemmy probably handles new and small communities better than Reddit does. We just don’t have as many users.
It’s funny because for new low-traffic communities now, Reddit is worse than the Fediverse in my opinion. The Fediverse has an effective catalog on every instance, you can search instances, you can rename your community to be more visible (you can’t do this on reddit). I would also suggest you look into Piefed, which has even more tools here.
Yeah because first of all, content had to be spread out across 562826 different communities for no reason other than that reddit had lots of communities, after growing for many many years. It started with just a few.
Then 99% of those were created on Lemmy.world, and every new user was directed to sign up at Lemmy.world.
I guess a lot of people here are younger than me and didn’t experience forums, but we had like 30 forum channels. That was enough to talk about anything at all. And I believe it’s the same here, it would have been enough. And then all channels would have easy to find content.
this makes me think we should have a marker for communities that are inactive/dead or an easy way to hide them or filter them out in favor of more active communities
They should just be locked down until we have a bigger userbase
The topic comes up regularly on !fedigrow@lemmy.zip
If they are locked, the people who come here and see them locked will go elsewhere instead of contributing, because they literally can’t.
Some people came here to creat communities (eg.: in the wake of Reddit stuff) with the hope that it would catch on. But we can’t expect them to do all the work.
Locked with a pinned post to a more active community https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/39199203
My usual concern with force redirecting people to “where the stuff is popular” is that it promotes centralization, which is the literal opposite of why we’re here. Besides, as I’ve commented some other times, the feasibility of user participation is not transitive across instances. !soccer@sports.xyz might have a completely different rules, mood or culture than !soccer@euro.pe , or the redirect might lead to !soccer@ya.ml which is blocked in my country or otherwise made unavailable. (I am using examples here ofc but I guess this could very well hit people in and around feddit.uk, for one).
There is literally no punishment for keeping a community open so it can sometime either grow organically or die organically. Locking them however, fully prevents either option.
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.
+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
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 :)
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
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
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
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.
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
That’s exactly what the Local feed is for.
If you don’t want All, don’t use All. Because the 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.
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.
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”)
how do I follow specific users?
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
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…
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.
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.
try Mbin https://joinmbin.org/
Mbin and piefed would be better for that.
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.
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.
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.
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
although they do show crossposts already and v1.0 will have multi-communities
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
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.
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.
Lemmy’s privacy is a joke compared to other social media since all your posts are permanently public under your profile with no option to restrict visibility, meaning not only can anyone see your outdated cringe-worthy posts anytime, but any tech company could probably de-anonymize your profile just by looking at the topics you post in.
This is a valid complaint in an ideal world, but in our current world this happens with every other site that has the same discussion model as lemmy. Your posts are not gone when you delete them on reddit. Reddit has a ton of mirrors and reddit themselves will never delete your post.
Personally I’d rather see lemmy grow as it is rather than die try the extremely tough task of building a good federated privacy protocol. The privacy on lemmy comes from being able to create an account while providing no info, being able to access from TOR. People seeing your public posts is debatably even a privacy issue.
This is typical of forum software. Some have access controls, but they’re at the admin/moderator level.
…It’s literally a public communication network? The point is that what you post is seen.
If you want private there’s Signal, Jabber, etc. Wholly different purposes.
That’s… the point?
That’s by design though. There’s no way to have a federated system and ensure that everything deletes it.
Lemmy privacy isn’t a joke, because there isn’t any. It’s 100% public by design.
If you want to keep something private, don’t post it publicly online.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Don’t use github, don’t post like an AI, don’t compare to piefed without constructive criticism.
I am not able to import data from a backup file. It always says “Try importing or exporting after a few minutes”
NSFW only filter. Flip the existing one, add that as radio button with the NSFW block.
