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!
I think it’s because it’s just memes and also quite hard moderation and downvotes. It feels like a reddit clone that has the exact same mindset as reddit. I get annoyed when I see people being moderated for having an opinion that is not popular.
I saw a post being locked yesterday for asking about moderation. Doesn’t anyone else see the problem with that? Your channels rules are not more important than making people feel they can talk and express what’s on their mind.
I hate that so much. Stop treating people like they are just resources to moderate.
I don’t see much discussions. But I’m sure there is a few here and there.
It certainly doesn’t help that Lemmy had and still has absolutely no sensible way to actually surface niche communities to its subscribers. Unlike Reddit, it doesn’t weigh posts by their relative popularity within the community but only by total popularity/popularity within the instance. There’s also zero form of community grouping (like Reddit’s multireddits) - all of which effectively eliminates all niche communities from any sensible main view mode and floods those with shitty memes and even shittier politics only. This pretty much suffocated the initially enthusiastic niche tech communities I had subscribed to. They stood no chance to thrive and their untimely death was inevitable.
There are some very tepid attempts to remedy this in upcoming Lemmy builds, but I fear it’s too little too late.
I fear that Lemmy was simply nowhere near mature enough when it mattered and it has been slowly bleeding users and content ever since. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, though.
The “Top of All Time” lists on Lemmy are currently dominated by posts from the exodus period, potentially overshadowing excellent content from both before and after this event.
Unfortunately, none of the suggested solutions can be implemented as the required data hasn’t been tracked over time by the software.
Automatic OCR and filtering based on content in an image.
My biggest issue is that when I post, I’m torn between sharing in the community of the largest instance or in the instance I prefer the most. Posting in the largest instance offers more visibility for my post, but it feels like I’m not supporting the instance I truly like. The communities are too fragmented.
I think “cross posting” but like as a symlink would be great for this - i.e. if you click on the post in either community, you see the same comments
I personally like distributing my posts between instances that I feel are trustworthy as it provides backup instances (thereby increasing the bus factor) which should cover the unfortunate situation of an instance shutting down.
Since we’re all federated I’m no longer forced to put all my eggs into 1 basket like reddit🤗
Something like multireddits or Kbin collections would solve this, but it would still take a lot of effort to turn all similar communities into a single group. I really hope there is an automatic way to solve this.
Multicommunities have been funded: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_for_Lemmy
I think multi-communities (which have already been improved for funding) will push Lemmy forward big time. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
This is definitely my biggest request
lemmy-ui: Highlighting some words blindly in inline code is really annoying. For example,
systemctl --user cat emacspactl load-module module-switch-on-connect
Workaround: use multiline code blocks with defined language, e.g:
systemctl --user cat emacs pactl load-module module-switch-on-connectDrawback: you cant use it in a list or inline
Downvotes are an inherently unequal proposition, as they are now implemented. This allows everything from near and dear friends who respectfully disagree to randos with day-one accounts who don’t even know what a community is all about, to brigading events organized in a larger community (possibly on Reddit or in Matrix or Discord or such). e.g. iirc I can user-block someone or even an entire instance, but in retaliation they can see my profile and downvote everything I have ever done, or have a bot do so within seconds of new material coming out. Which would affect its discoverability.
Potential solutions would be to make them no longer anonymous, and/or when you block a user or an instance then they can no longer downvote that content - just like a user-level defederation. As it is now, user-level blocks are extremely weak and even notifications can be delivered by simply tagging someone’s username.
There are instances where downvotes are disabled, if you don’t like them you can just use an instance like that.
Downvotes are public and not anonymous, but they are hidden in Lemmy ui. Afaik you can see who downvotes your posts from Piefed or Mbin. See this thread: https://lemmy.world/post/18805474 or this: https://piefed.social/post/205362
Lemmy: exactly - so you can either have all of downvotes or none of them, by picking such an instance, but there is really nothing in-between. Yet another example of “in-between” could be to show like downvotes from only members already subscribed to the community.
Mbin iirc doesn’t allow downvoting at all and instead has its own system of “reduces”, which does not federate at all with Lemmy, but instead acts as just another form of it. And yes those are publicly visible, which puts it ahead of Lemmy in this respect.
Piefed does the exact opposite of what I’m suggesting, even going so far as to hide the identity of downvoters from remote admins, who may need to know such things in order to ban someone who is being consistently abusive. I don’t think this is a good experiment. Anonymous polling results would be awesome though, so it depends on which type of “voting” we are talking about here.
Mostly what I mean is that someone who posts content to the Fediverse has to expose themselves in order to do that. Whereas downvoting goes against that principle, allowing someone to do what looks to 99.99% of Fedizens as an entirely anonymous procedure.
Also, a viewer can block a poster whose content they dislike and thereby never have to hear from them again, but not vice versa - the recipient has no choice but to receive votes (up or down). Except, as you mentioned, by going to an instance that disables them entirely. Which does not help all the enormous number of members already in instances such as Lemmy.world.
Hence the roles of content creator vs. viewer are unequal, skewed in favor of the downvoters having more power than the posters. Which can inhibit content creation, and given how lack of content (especially niche) is the primary issue with the Fediverse, it seems like making the roles more equal would help.
Thank you for the clarification, I understand what is your issue now
MBIN makes upvotes visible, but PieFed doesn’t. The thread you linked to is about PieFed anonymising votes, so they aren’t revealed on instances like MBIN.
A more robust approach could involve combining multiple user engagement metrics like votes, reading time and number of comments, along with a system that sorts posts depending on how they compare to their community averages. This system would be less susceptible to manipulation by new accounts or brigading, as it would require genuine engagement across multiple factors to influence a post’s ranking.
Incorporating User Engagement Metrics in Lemmy’s Sorting Algorithms
In general I find that the comments that tend to contain the highest proportion of batshit insanity across the entire Fediverse - I’m talking reminding me of what it was like to argue with Magats on Reddit - are those from lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml. e.g., ignoring 90% of what I say while hyper-focusing on a single thing, which they manage to twist into sounding as if I said the exact opposite, while demanding that I provide proof of all of my points, and ofc offering none of their own proof in return, plus what “proof” is offered ends up supporting my own point rather than theirs… It’s fucking exhausting.
And moreover it’s relentless. So it would seem that my options are to either move to Lemmy.cafe - the only one who has defederated from all of the big 3 - or block such people one by one, or just put up with it, since user blocking those instances does virtually nothing. Also, they could easily create an alt, on let’s say lemmy.world, to accomplish their anonymized downvoting fetishes.:-P
Do you recall if people are allowed to vote on your content after you’ve blocked them? Even if so though, those user blocks of instances (as compared to user blocks of users) would not block downvotes (they don’t even block showing of content, plus notifications can even still be sent just by tagging the recipient’s username), so someone who downvotes but never speaks up by commenting would go unnoticed.
Anyway, my own preferences aside, I’m trying to think of what would encourage people to post content more often, and reducing the overall level of toxicity present in the Fediverse seems like it would greatly help with that (even if that ends up being something that you have to curate yourself via blocklists, with mods and admins being unwilling and unable to keep up with such).
allow me to be the batshit representative from lemmy.ml to argue with you :P
Honestly, I just hate the instance bashing. Most people didn’t have a real informed “choice” when it comes to their first instance. This seemed like an instance with good uptime and connectivity to me compared to the single admin instance I had before, the only factor that really matters to me. I see what you’re saying about % of users, but those people exist on every instance and like you said, they can just jump over and make a new account. If I’m being judged by the .ml next to my name and not the content of my reply, then they were really never going to listen to anything I had to say regardless, so I’ve decided to stay with this instance.
I think you’re seeing more arguments on those instances because it’s more of a melting pot. People who all agree with each other’s perspectives and have similar life experience aren’t going to have a lot to discuss besides patting each other on the backs and talking about subtle nuances of the subject matter. I do agree with your entire premise of the downvotes, which is why I’m replying to begin with. I like the thought of a downvote system, something that would hinder off-topic or abusive material, but it’s just horribly abused by users.
A proper system would see two competing articles and the one which provides the most information with a legible format would be upvoted the most. Now it’s which one has the most comments, what user uploaded it, what website was the article published on, which headline is catchier regardless of the article’s own words being taken out of context, what instance/community is this being posted on, etc etc.
Maybe I’m just confused and using this site and reddit wrong. From my conversations about downvotes, my understanding is less time is being spent on reading the article or links, and more just running through upvoting/downvoting like it’s tinder matches. I don’t get it because it’s not like youtube suggestions where you’re creating an algorithm for your likes/dislikes. You’re just creating a general feed of populace attention-seeking content and creating the pattern for a hive mind to form.
I think any of the many solutions would be a step forward, votes being public (all your other interactions are public/not done anonymously, and likes/dislikes has no commonality to democratic voting so people need to stop conflating the two), blocking any downvotes like lemmynsfw.com successfully implemented (you can still report off topic, etc), can only dowvote in joined communities or content you’ve engaged with, and many other ideas. All sorts of solutions that will stop us from going down the same path as Reddit, luckily we have instances to experiment different approaches with that we can point to for data in the future. I guess I prefer more of a forum style but those always get overtaken by zealous admins/site ideology and eventually hyperactive community members meaning it’s hard or not worth the effort to actually engage with the drama surrounding the subject you want to discuss (even some shroom forums get like this, absolutely crazy).
Sure!
Yes, my whole “spiel” there left out how my blocking lemmy.ml leavs out a whole huge swath of innocent bystanders who, exactly as you said, simply joined a large instance and had no concept of what was going on, plus back then it wasn’t even happening yet to the extent that it is now.
Speaking of, a large number of instances defederated from hexbear.net, and in response it seems that a large number of people - the kind for whom “no means yes” simply created lemmy.ml alts to get around those. Thinking deeper about what that means and extrapolating forward implies then that if lemmy.ml were to ever be defederated from by a large number of instances as well, then those people would simply create alts on lemmy.world (or something) instead.
So it boils down to an ideological POV: must I be exposed to literally everything online with no way to have any filters (some people want this and that’s cool), or am I allowed to curate my experiences? More to the point, some things such as NSFW content are really quite friendly on the Fediverse - so long as it is labelled, the people who want it can get it, while those who do not (for whatever reason - maybe they’d like to have it at home but they are literally at work and don’t want that tension, so they turn it off?). Unfortunately, both (a) toxic people and (b) extremist content (“extremist” from the perspective of people in the western world, particularly USA - which granted is very much skewed wrt the rest of the world, but… it is what it is) are not labelled at all. Therefore new people walk right into it, see things that they do not want - much as if NSFW, or worse yet NSFL, were to not be labelled - and then leave the Fediverse. So I am saying: it would be good if things could be labelled appropriately, for the sake of maximum friendliness and welcoming.
But as it is, things are NOT labelled, or if they are, the labels are buried elsewhere. When I first switched from Kbin to a Lemmy instance, I made the mistake of replying to a content on ChapoTrapHouse on hexbear.net. I had no idea what that community was - it’s whole purpose is to dunk on people!? - and I am not saying that the community should not “exist”, but DAYUM! A warning would indeed have been nice. And now, I do not need such a warning personally - I KNOW - but every person that I tell about Lemmy irl, in the next conversation comes back with negative things to say about it, in how it has such extremist content. So they do not join, and this effect magnified by everyone in the mainstream lowers the overall amount of content across the Fediverse. Thus, this isn’t about any one post, any one community, or even any one instance. Good fences make good neighbors. If people on hexbear.net or occasionally some on lemmy.ml disrespect others boundaries, then it makes sense to block them. Though I am having quite a pleasant conversation with you personally, and have done so with others from lemmy.ml. Overall though, on balance, I find it necessary to block that instance. Which I note barely matters - e.g. you replied to me here, and I got the notification for that, I could see your comment, you can see mine… this is the weakest type of “block”/“ban” that I have ever heard of, so much so that the name is really improper, as it barely blocks anything at all.
And no, they don’t exist on every instance. Or yeah, surely they do, but not in the enormously large numbers that we are talking about here. I will preemptively say that I get a lot of batshit insane replies from lemmy.world too - so yeah, lemmy.ml is not the only one like that. However, the proportion of responses is different, probably b/c I (who lives in the USA) shares more ideologically in common with someone from lemmy.world. So perhaps they would go off on a rant against something that I say, but the “trigger” to make that happen is less likely to happen. I have not done a scientific study, with controls and such - I am just speaking of my personal experience, which I see is shared by a LOT of people across the Fediverse.
It sounds like you are just being counter-cultural, which I have done more than a little of in my life, so I support that. You seem willing to bear the consequences of that, e.g. you risked me not replying to you, although then I did so… hopefully that shows that the “judgement” of the .ml next to your name is not a firm yes-no but merely a slight bias.
So about down-votes: personally I want to receive down-votes, if people do not enjoy receiving my comments. That is helpful feedback, and helps guide me to submit future content more in line with people’s receptivity. The problem comes when the down-votes are from people that I do not respect. An example would help here: let’s say that I submit a youtube video for my favorite hard rock band to a tiny niche community, specifically for hard rock music, and let us further say that people downvote it for these reasons: (1) they do not like the music - fair; (2) they do not like youtube - okay… I guess… still fair; (3) they do not like hard rock music at all, but saw my post while browsing “All” - these people are not Subscribed to this community, and are improperly abusing the system of down-voting away from “this content is not a good match for this community” to “I do not (personally) enjoy this content”. The latter type would be much better handled by blocking that community entirely - but people refuse to abide by the rules, and maybe do not even know what they are, if they are new. Oh and also (4) I managed to piss off a troll, who then goes to my Profile and down-votes literally everything they see, until they get tired of hitting the “Next” page (ironically I don’t think this has happened to me, which I would expect given my instance-bashing behaviors, but I have seen others where it has, mostly those who post in more political communities).
As you said, yes the creation of the hive mind. IF people would use it properly, then it would not be that way, but again, people refuse or are not able to so… here we are.
And one reason for that is that we have so few developers - Rust is a very hard language to learn, and those devs I suspect are prickly to work with (given their moderation practices on lemmy.ml, mass-banning people from communities they’ve never even heard of, so would they similarly reject someone’s actual code, not based on the integrity of the code but rather on some offhand remark that they make even on some other instance, possibly even taken out of context?). I have ENORMOUS respect for the Lemmy codebase that has been developed so far… but I also wish that it could move forward more quickly. Maybe Mbin/Sublinks/Piefed will do so, as they are written in languages that more people already know.
Also there are enormous barriers to running a personal instance - CSAM attacks to name one, hardware and especially network bandwidth to name another - but what it would take would be for someone to spin up their own instance, and try out a new system of voting. Nothing really is stopping anyone from doing so except… it’s hard. Otherwise, beggers cannot be choosers, so we wait for an actual developer to do something. And in the meantime we talk about a subject that we find of interest, but it won’t lead to any changes. Probably. Maybe - though also, maybe not, b/c perhaps one day there will be a poll put out by the developers, and with enough people answering that, we could ask for a change that we would like to see in the code? :-)
I really wish Lemmy had tags like RES
We need an RSS feed for saved posts, but the Devs seem to think it would be a privacy issue. Now idk what kinda Fucked up porn They’re saving on Lemmy but I just want to read the articles I save on here in my RSS reader.
Just implemented it for fun on my instance (lemmings.world). Sadly you need to be a user of that instance for it to work. When logged in you go to https://lemmings.world/rss/init, afterwards a link is shown (among other information) that looks something like
https://lemmings.world/rss/4e6490fe0613f6e2e03cd420f71df14476e769b57604652921c1a7b2150f0888- that is your personal RSS feed of stuff you saved with a URL that cannot be guessed automatically (the hash is entirely random).It could be made to work for all instances, but that would take me a while. You can also ask the admins to install the app on their website (it’s open source and can be found at https://github.com/RikudouSage/LemmyPersonalRss).
Cool feature!
Displaying profile bios more prominently and encouraging the display of them would help everyone know if the user shared links to their other accounts or other SNS links and whatnot
This would also help fellow moderators and admins know if the newly created user is a real admin/mod that created a duplicate account or is just an impersonator
It would be nice if communities that are similar enough could “share” a comment thread, so you don’t end up with comments scattered over many different communities for the same link. The mods could toggle something in the settings and say “This other community is good and we’ll be OK sharing posts with them”. You also wouldn’t have to explicitly crosspost.
User-Driven Linking:
- Allow users to suggest links between related posts, with a voting system to confirm relevance.
- Create a “Related Discussions” section for each post, populated by user suggestions.
I want something like that too, although it’s worth noting that the implementation corner-case details could be horrendous.
Consolidated View:
- Create a “Consolidated Thread” view that aggregates comments from all related posts into a single, cohesive conversation.
- Provide an option to switch between individual instance views and the consolidated view.
It might be helpful to be able to set default per community for something like this. For example, [email protected], it would be a jumbled mess to have it be all in one thread
Neat, thanks!
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.
Suggestion: Easy account migration between instances
Imagine you register to Lemmy.world, but realize you’re missing half the content because it comes from Hexbear or Lemmygrad users. Migrating to Lemmy.ml is a solution for this
On old instance: Settings -> Import/Export Settings -> Export (as JSON), then on new instance repeat but Import (give it the JSON).
Also note that there is no single instance that is not defederated from something or another - e.g. lemm.ee that is famous for its inclusivity still blocks e.g. threads.net.
And several users of hexbear.net have indicated a desire to remove itself from the wider Fediverse (which probably won’t happen, but I just wanted to point out that such matters are not always externally imposed, but sometimes arise from within).
I don’t like hexbear. I feel concerned for their users.
There is no reason that you should. Like magas though, they have a right to exist, yet I would prefer that that happen somewhere not near me.:-)
True, didn’t looked at this way…
There are (unfortunately) many profound similarities, and underlying reasons, e.g. both involve echo chambers that insulate them from the wider world, promoting childish modes of thinking (e.g. those who speak most aggressively “win”), such that whatever is “claimed” to be believed in, is not actually the case.
This
Also note that there is no single instance that is not defederated from something or another
I mean, you could run a personal instance that’s completely open lol
Good point. There are enormous hazards with that though - especially for people in countries where the presence of CSAM on someone’s machine that feeds it out to minors could potentially land someone in jail.
So perhaps it would be trivial for you, but not everyone is in that kind of situation.
still blocks e.g. threads.net.
Anyway Lemmy can’t interact with threads.net.
I’m guessing they did it preemptively and as a gesture. Or perhaps some CSAM-containing instance took that name in the past:-).
Edit: yup, the first one: https://lemm.ee/post/851217.
Most people want to block those instances, not access them.
Keyboard navigation. I know about https://github.com/vmavromatis/Lemmy-keyboard-navigation but it’s annoying that I have to use an addin/userscript for such a basic feature.
You can use the Photon frontend instead.
Photon doesn’t exactly have keyboard navigation, i’ve been working on it though
