Let’s compose a list of the all shortcomings so that we can address them and eventually hit 100k mau.
When you block someone, you can still see that they replied to you. I don’t want to know of their existence period, that’s why I’m blocking them and they shouldn’t have a chance to respond to me period. It’s not blocking if they can reply to me and I still see a notification that they did.
Its always about one of two things:
-
Instances going down forever. - kbin, even though its not lemmy, had a more appealing UI to me and my little brother. We’re on fedia now, but I only really use it to lurk when Lemmy.world won’t load randomly. I don’t think he even uses it at all anymore.
-
De-federation. - Beehaw caused several other people I know IRL to go back to reddit within a week. The timing was so perfect to wreck the API boycott that I’m almost convinced the Beehaw mods work for reddit. “Everything was broken” and now lemmy is dead and gone forever in their eyes, some even assuming the whole thing is literally gone now. They’re not willing to try again.
Nah, I have a different gripe:
When the reddit exodus happened, Lemmy was flooded with copycat communities for every popular subreddit. That’s fine with me. But what’s not fine is that very few of these communities use the same posting rules (if any at all) so they’re homogenized. Like what is the difference between nostupidquestions and asklemmy?
I have another one that’s not specific to Lemmy but absolutely applies: meme “communities” where it’s all reposted content. I used community in quotes because these communities/subreddits/Instagram accounts are just…meme archives. You’ll find the same shit in every single meme archive on the internet. It feels like it’s less about sharing and more about having the biggest bucket.
Reddit means pointless or stupid repetition (I forget which). I guess that whole homogenized thing is baked in if they were to migrate.
As much as I hate what reddit has become, it was a LOT less of a problem over there. And despite its reputation for having power tripping mods, the communities with strictest rules were almost always the best ones
A well-moderated community is a good community online. Self policing doesn’t work when it’s thousands of strangers
Like what is the difference between nostupidquestions and asklemmy?
On Reddit at least, NSQ was supposed to have a “well, that might seem a stupid question” gist to it. But I agree that nowadays on Lemmy they are the same.
-
Can’t filter out non-English communities. On any given day, I could scroll through my feed and a third of them would be languages I can’t read. I wish I could, but I can’t.
You can set your languages in the settings. As the warning say, make sure to keep “Undetermined” check along English
I have to block the subcommunities one by one, and then block them again and again for every other instance that hosts that sublemmy
Nothing is deleted, just slightly obscured, and some apps don’t even do that. Child porn, illegal revenge porn, hate speech, everything is stored forever.
Finding instances for sure. Just learned in this thread that sorting by ‘all’ doesn’t show me every instance
Here are some great instance discovery resources:
Wait it doesn’t?! What does it do then?
Here are some great instance discovery resources:
Yes thank you, I’m aware of those. :) I meant via your own instance. I’m registered on a very small instance, and being able to discover other instances from your own would make it much more usable.
…Unless that is already possible. Lemmy isn’t that intuitive, at least for me
Hello,
Any reason you chose an instance this small? There are only 53 monthly active users. Lemmy.zip or lemm.ee would probably work better for you
Decentralization
It’s my own observation, but a lot of people on Lemmy are smug assholes, including many mods.
How did someone describe it? Like 14y/o 4chan users with the cynicism of a 45y/o?
That feels shockingly accurate
Hey wait a minute I resemble this strawman
Shockingly familiar to early days Reddit. There was a sweet spot before Reddit got as big as it is today. I can’t tell you when it was but it was there somewhere.
Yeah well that’s just, like, your opinion man.
The fact that many on the internet haven’t gotten past the largest hurdle, creating a Lemmy account.
We’re currently at 462k created accounts.
Isn’t it always that >95% of users are lurkers? I don’t bother logging in most of the time, I just go to lemmy.world or something and sort by all
I said this a while ago on another thread, but if I was a Dev on the project I would be working to create a website that automatically signs you up for an instance. The high level concept is instances would opt into this pool, the user would simply put in their username like any regular website, and then the system would create them an account on whichever instance was best for them (maybe based on ping/trying to spread population around).
This would majorly reduce the barrier to entry in my opinion, because a lot of people just want to browse, and don’t care about the federation aspect at all.
Which instances would you put into this pool besides lemm.ee and lemmy.zip?
- lemmy.world is too large
- sh.itjust.works is a non neutral name (most people probably won’t mind, but some others might be deterred)
- beehaw.org is behind and deferated
- lemmy.dbzer0.com andn discuss.tchncs.de have a name that can be hard to remember
- programming.dev is topic-oriented
- lemmy.ca, feddit.nl, feddit.org and sopuli.xyz are country/language-oriented
- lemmy.blahaj.zone is queer-oriented, not sure they want people who don’t support queer people to join
- other instances are probably not busy enough to have all the communities subscribed
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/ filtered by MAU
I guess another problem is, larger instances are more likely to be reliably up, if you randomly signed people up to a smaller instance running in someone’s bedroom thant they switch off at night then that user’s experience is going to be terrible, but if you combat this by only having large instances in that pool then the large instances get larger and smaller instances will essentially freeze at their current size because the main way of signing up would become this portal that assigns you to instances rather than specifically joining an instance. It might encourage the fediverse to become considerably less federated and a lot more centralised.
This one is my biggest challenge too… I wish there was, like, a “trial” instance that folks were automatically signed up for and then after 30 days they had to switch and find another instance.
Once you’re in the door it’s lovely, but that first barrier to entry scares people off.
Too many terrorist simps, too much mod abuse, too much disinformation, too many Tankies, discovery of communities is hard with how federation works and kinda requires third party apps.
I believe it’s just obnoxious trolling users who’ve been banned multiple times from Reddit now come flooding here to pull their shit again.
When you block someone, all the subsequent comments made to that person’s comment are also unable to be viewed.
Generally mods of the communities still suck to an absolute extent, not as bad as reddit but still nowhere near acceptable.
I hate not being informed of bans, and I think they are all permanent.
They not all permanent, Lemmy displays the duration in the mod log. I agree that there should be some kind of notification though.
Gosh the permanent bans being handed out like candy to someone being rude is often too much.
The politics is very left wing and very unwelcoming to any other viewpoint.
if a “viewpoint” is based on lies coming from a convicted felon rapist traitor to the country, than anyone holding that viewpoint can actually go fuck themselves
OP never stated what country they’re from, you’ve just gone on some rant about Trump without even thinking that they may not be from the US.
Classic US defaultism.
true, there are non-US right-wingers. but in this case the commenter mentioned he might just vote for trump “out of spite” LOL
so my “US defaultism” was correct
I put a little flag in my username and still get us defaultism. So i guess the Americans are just morons.
I don’t see a flag, just ‘muntedcrocodile’
What client u using ima make an issue on github. Depends on language if i can make a pull request.
Not every method of viewing Lemmy shows things like that… all I see is “muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee,” no flags or whatever. Thankfully, I have a good memory - so I’ll be able to remember that you’re an international twat.
Well stop using a shit client that doesnt support displaynames.
and very unwelcoming to any other viewpoint.
Thank you for providing a great example of this
i mean, top comment started with a criticism that generalized the entirety of lemmy, so i understood it to be a thing that was totally fine in this thread
Staunch Obama and Biden supporter here … I’ve read Obama and Kamala’s most recent books…
You do not need to be a Trumpie to get annoyed with the “everything is emshittified”, “fuck capitalism”, etc posts and comments.
What a perfect example of what the top comment meant. “You either 100% agree with us or you are a trumpist/fascist/nazi”, no in-between, no nuance, no moderation allowed.
“You either 100% agree with us or you are a trumpist/fascist/nazi”
if someone’s voting for trump, then yea. that’s exactly what they are.
if you sit down to dinner with 8 people and one of them is a nazi, then you’re eating with 8 nazis
maybe trump voters don’t come to lemmy because they know they’ll get shat on. they’re free to make an instance of their own like hexbear and lemmygrad.
but the thing about trump voters is that you can’t have a rational discussion with them, because they throw everything they don’t like to hear out the window as “fake news”
so yea. they can still go fuck themselves
My point is that there is a infinity of nuance between the far left and trumpist, but too many extreme leftists tend to consider anything right of them as far right, therefore forbidding discussion that doesn’t 100% go their preferred way. This is part of what makes a big chunk of Lemmy unwelcoming.
But nobody talked about Trump, did they?
You assumed and started that.
Not everyone who is right wing is voting for trump.
Are you seeing Lemmy being intolerant of all right wing discussion, or just Maga bullshit like sol is railing against
Anytime you mention anything right wing you get a lot of downvotes and a lot of railing against MAGA. It is almost enough to make be vote for Trump just out of spite. There might be a “silent majority” that doesn’t do that, but the evidence that anyone can see: comments and votes are clearly intolerant of all right wing discussion.
Just look at all the different replies I’ve got - most of them instead of looking at Lemmy in the mirror proved the point by jumping onto railing against MAGA.
I absolutely 100% get what you mean.
But I’d implore you to wait a Moment and think about it. Voting for Trump isn’t only going to “own the Tankies”, It will also damage everyone else, including you. Don’t let others bully you into voting for someone that doesn’t help you. Be egoistic, vote for someone who actually cares about you.
That’s because all of right wing politics is hurting people for no good reason.
To me, voting for Trump “out of spite” doesn’t sound like something a person would do if they cared about others. I hope you won’t do that.
I think the problem is more that maga has taken over the right wing, and instead of distancing themselves from maga, a lot of conservatives end up defending it. Which should not be tolerated imo.
If someone is intolerant of maga, what is so hard about saying “I don’t like them either”
No need to go right actually, even defending social democrate values may attract intolerant leftists on some instances.
I see both. Even moderate conservative view point tend to get straw manned as being MAGA. Heck I see left leaning people who just didn’t like that Biden was running get bashed for suggesting the Democrats run a different candidate. Now I see the same on anything less the pro Kamala.
If Harris anonymously posted a self criticism on here I wouldn’t be surprised if people called her MAGA. That’s not to say everyone here acts that way but a vocal percentage does.
oh that’s right-- conservatives also push for privatizing and deregulating everything, small government (except when it comes to gay marriage and gay books in the library), mandatory jesus for everyone, no taxes for billionaires, all the taxes for peasants, blaming all the world’s problems on mexicans-- what am i leaving out? oh yea, this
Let me head over to lemmy.ml and create a list of all the things the left wing stands for too. There is no particular agreement on any side on all issues. Governments have often done a poor job of what they should do, and when they do something you don’t get any options. There are many regulations causing more harm than good. And so on - there is plenty of observation and logic behind the various right wing positions - you don’t have to agree with them, but please start thinking about things from other points of view and understanding instead of attacking someone who makes one point on every possible thing you disagree with assuming they both support that other thing as well, and also that they are evil.
a vote for R is objectively the wrong vote
edit: as a reminder, we’re talking about people who cause and advocate for this
Are we though?
Where did we start talking about “this”?
You decided to make it about “this”.
https://www.propublica.org/article/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-abortion-ban-emtala?
please. republicans are 100% responsible for this. try to make it about anything other than right wing viewpoints
and in case it hasn’t been made clear, i’m not disagreeing with the point that right wingers aren’t welcome, i’m explaining why, and why they shouldn’t be welcome fucking anywhere. republican “values” are a fucking cancer
Mexican here, I’ve seen it multiple times, the current party in power in my country is everything Lemmy criticises of the Republicans, the CCP and Putin (hell, the expresident bowed down to Trump, Putin and Maduro) but since they claim to be the left and the current
puppet of the cult leaderpresident is a woman, most of Lemmy rushes to their defense every time someone criticises them because muh left.Tankies gonna tankie
I’m pretty sure Lemmy has a right wing bloc of instances.
Ive had a look af them and most are filled with posts that have 80% dislikes on them.
Maybe but they are not in my feeds.
Hmmm interesting, I should search for them.
I could see libertarians starting up their own instances.
Agreed, basically if you are moderate, you have to block 2 or 3 major instances to escape from extremist content. That’s very unwelcoming for new users.
Extremist…lol. Please continue to feel unwelcome.
If you don’t see grad as extreme you are lost in the sauce
They’re extremist and openly advocate murder. Hexbear users threatened to kill me.
Some Hexbear users wished to some French instances users to get more Charlie Hebdo events.
It’s too fractured, posts in one community on one instance have separate comments and interaction to the same post in the same community on another instance, even if you use crossposts properly, and it clutters up your feed with multiple of the same post
What the hell I didn’t even know this existed. I just chose all posts and thought I was seeing the aggregate content from every instance. Also, Seeing the usernames (with different instances on it), it made me believe everyone’s interactions are saved and visible.
Posts within the same community are synced and you can see communities from different instances. The point is that news@instance1 and news@instance2 are different communities even though the names are similar.
The counter argument is that reddit has the same problem even without federation. /r/games, /r/gaming and /r/gamers are three different subreddits with very similar names and you have no way of knowing which one is the “main” gaming community unless you check each of them. With time, this will probably sort itself out with lemmy as well. It just takes time for one of the similar communities to become the de facto standard.
One problem is that the API call that returns the feed doesn’t provide crosspost information (unless that’s changed in 0.19.4+ since i’m still developing against 0.19.3).
Crossposts in the feed have to be done client side, and you can only “roll up” ones that have the same URL (Tesseract can optionally roll up on identical titles if there’s no URL). However, that’s limited to just the ones that come through in the same fetch (unless you store all posts locally, which is something I’m considering in the future for offline support; most apps don’t).
The API call that populates the
/post
page does provide that crosspost data, and I’ve thought about making an option to combine the comments from each into one “megapost”. But there are a few problems with that:-
Officially, crossposts are only compared against the URL. The crossposts may have different titles, and one or both may have different text in the post bodies. Which do you display?
-
Culture clashes. Let’s say there’s an article posted called “Ford Releases Their New Monstrosity 5000”. It gets posted to
c/cars
andc/fuckcars
by different people with different intentions.
The tone of the comments would be wildly different since the two communities are basically ideologically opposites. The replies to comments that came in from
c/fuckcars
would be responding to car enthusiasts fromc/cars
and vice-versa. It would basically be a form of soft brigading.- It would be confusing for moderators to have multiple communities’ comments in the same post. What flies in one may violate a rule in another. Mods would only be able to take action against those in their community and not all.
I’ve wanted to do a feature like that for a while now, but every time I’ve tried to plan it out, it always seems like it would just make things worse. Even with indicators as to which community the comment came from, it’s still not ideal.
-
…is it weird that I actually like this part of it? It feels like it allows there to be different “flavors” of communities, and I can decide which flavor I like and which one I don’t.
I can see how it would get frustrating as a poster trying to figure out which community will get the most reach.
I don’t think it’s weird. Right now it probably isn’t great cause the pool of commenters is already small, and this dilutes it further, but I think in a world where we had plenty of people in all those communities it would be fine.
It does suck on the posting aide, though, and it also seems like there might be some use to a tool/feature that merges them somehow so you’re viewing it all together and respond to whoever you like in one place.
Reddit has the same issue. People will post an article in like 6, somewhat related subreddits and the feed would be quite repetitive.
This is a big one. Its probably doomed to imperfection and hold out Mods who don’t want to do it but I think some kind of Community Sync option would be huge.
- The syntax of linking to users, posts, communities etc. is hard to keep a mental grip on. I know they couldn’t exactly copy reddit’s u/ for users and r/ for subreddits, but ! for communities and @ for users isn’t as schematic. I think it’s why you see it used less than on Reddit. And if you start to type a username, and an autocomplete window pops up, it inserts that format in brackets followed by a URL in parenthesis. To the right of the text box I’m typing in, I see, and I’ll approximate this as best I can:
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world
asklemmy@lemmy.world
Neither has the exclamation point reminding you how to use that feature. My bipolar ex girlfriend had a more consistent UI than that.
- Linking to posts and comments is just pure moon logic. Follow me here:
This Post is stored on lemmy.world, right? Where is the comment I’m currently writing stored? on lemmy.world, or sh.itjust.works?
@kibiz0r@midwest.social commented on this post, I’m going to use it as an example. There are two buttons next to their username. Both have the hover over tooltip “link”.
The chain looking one gives me this URL: https://sh.itjust.works/post/27359355/14761082
The…fedigon? What’s the name of the 5-pointed rainbow fediverse icon? looking one gives me this URL: https://midwest.social/comment/13230476
If I wanted to refer to kibiz0r’s comment in some other thread somewhere else, which of those links should I use? I figure in most cases I’m addressing an audience of the entire fediverse not just my fellow sh.itheads, so why would I ever use the first link? What does someone from lemm.ee see when they click on either of those links? Do they get to see it through their own account on their instance, or do they get linked directly to another instance? This really breaks the idea of “one account, whole fediverse.”
When they post asking for help with Windows and get an entire thread of answers from obnoxious elitist wankers who couldn’t even decide on a distro between them
Gee maybe they should try using Windows tech support then
The default web interface is very poorly designed and looks uninviting. Sure, there are great alternative interfaces but people will be turned off before they could check them out. Also, it’s usually the first thing you see when someone’s sharing a link.
There not being an official app is also something that will confuse non-tech users.
Wait what? I love the look currently
Indeed an official app would ease the user on-boarding.
I had to read through some articles first to get the concept of the fediverse first and the look out for my home instance. That’s way too techy
We need a guide to send perspective users to signup through Lemm.ee and voyager to onboard them.
Original content could entice them to more willingly join Lemmy.
The default web interface is very poorly designed and looks uninviting.
A redesign is on the way. It will use Leptos with DaisyUI.
There not being an official app is also something that will confuse non-tech users.
Jerboa is official.
Is Jerboa official? I used it at the start but it seemed to just stop getting developed. Myself and plenty of others have since moved on to other 3rd party apps. I’m using Voyager now.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/jerboa?tab=readme-ov-file#support--donate
“Jerboa is made by Lemmy’s developers”
The default web interface is very poorly designed and looks uninviting.
Disagree. I find it rather clean and functional, even on mobile. Maybe because I liked old reddit. Maybe younger people are used to Instagram-like feeds so they don’t like the compact forum style.
I thought Jerboa was the official app.