Lemmy.world improvements and issues

It surprised me that the communities list can't be sorted by clicking on column headers; especially because the mouse cursor becomes a pointing-finger when hovering over them.

Can I just quickly mention that I for one really appreciate the work done by @ruul to keep this instance working as well as it does , thank you.

On the homepage lemmy.world, new posts keep appearing at the top even when not sorting by new. This causes annoying layout shift, especially when browsing all communities, not just local ones. (I use Firefox / Win 10)

In the comment listing, each comment first has an avatar, then the username, then the [—] button to collapse the comment thread. Observation: Because username length varies from comment to comment, the [—] button is in a different horizontal position. Consequence: As a user, it is tedious to collapse several comment threads because I have to search for that [—] button.

Request: put the [—] button as first item, to the left of the avatar and username.

I scanned through the comments here and I don’t think it’s been mentioned yet, but I would love, love, love to have an option added to settings to open links in a new tab (or possibly windows if some people would prefer that). The current behavior is to open in the current tab, which I am so unaccustomed to I keep closing the tab when I’m done with it rather than hitting the back arrow.

It’s quite jarring to not open in a new tab these days, especially for external links.

Just joined! Thanks!

One small thing i would add for sign up is giving a message about waiting for being approved for the community, i was confused that it sent me back to the homepage until reading the docs.

There should be a way to set "my posting language is English" in my profile settings, so that it's automatically set to English when I post, evern single time, unless I go out of my way to choose something different for a particular post.

New posts appear "live" at the top of the frontpage regardless of what sorting method is chosen. This disrupts the reading process and minimizes any expanded image view. Is there any way to disable this "live feed" behavior?

Also, the "sorting help" button points to a dead link.

The upvote/downvote (or whatever you call it here) sometimes freaks out a bit.

Personally I think when clicking 'Post' it takes too long for it to be posted. I will see what I can do about this.

I've noticed that despite setting my default view to "All" in the user settings, my default view on the home page appears to be local.

It's not the worst thing ever, since hitting All is not a problem, just interesting it doesn't seem to work, unless I'm missing something!

Edit: It appears to have fixed itself, so maybe there was some time for the setting to kick in, although the local tab shows highlighted.

I noticed upvotes are behaving weirdly sometimes, like the upvote count of a post will shuffle between random numbers like 55 then 735 then 345 then 56 then 902 then 736 then 4 then 57 then 346 then 251 then 58. (Yeah, I noticed some of these are counsecutive which makes me think we're somehow upvoting on different counts and it shows the most recently upvoted.) Also sometimes when I upvote a comment my upvote disappears and sometimes it reappears later... why ?

The hot sort appears to be frozen for the last 24 hrs. The top posts on all or local haven't changed in nearly a day. There appears to be a bug causing a deadlock in the database (see issue 3076 for more info). The only solution seems to be to restart the instance when that thread crashes.

An Improvement I would like to see:

When scrolling my front page, I would like to be able to click the thread picture to a) see the 'body of the post' prior to entering the thread and b) if it is a picture be able to 'drag to resize' prior to entering the thread... I know these would all take a while to do, but it would be what I would like most.

The button "sorting help" links to a page that 404s:

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/01-getting-started.html/docs/en/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html

should probably be:

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html

If I do Posts -> All -> Top Week (or any other Top) it will show the top posts at first, but after waiting a minute or so the page will update with new posts at the top. This is usually how I browse and it makes it unusable.

Another thing is when I tried to login after signing up, the loading wheel just spun forever without any error messages. Turns out I needed to verify my email.

Some communities aren't updating on lemmy.world

Specifically, I moderate /c/[email protected] and I noticed that lemmy.world's side is not updating. No new posts from lemmy.ml's side, and their side shows 300+ subscribers while mine shows ~80

A couple times I’ve clicked a post and a completely different post opened. The latest one was a cat pic I was going to show my daughter and porn opened instead. I’m not subscribed to any porn communities and there weren’t any porn posts in the list on my homepage. This is a real problem. I went back and clicked the link and it worked as expected.

Also, as I was typing this comment, the main post I was replying to changed, but the comments stayed the same. Weird.

I have my viewing type set to "All" on my settings but when I go to the index page (lemmy.world), it's set to Local.

Not sure if it's an issue or just a symptom of lack of large communities yet but I also tend to see the same posts on the top every time ("If we want this to work out make content do not just lurk", "All the sad" and "important rulepost").

Edit: Also there's an issue when posting. I click "Post" and it gets stuck in the spinning icon despite my profile indicating my comment has been posted successfully.

Edit 2: Related to my second paragraph, I suggest changing the default sorting to Hot instead of Active. At least currently, Active keeps a handful of the same posts permanently on top, giving the impression of inactivity for newcomers used to Reddit. Hot will provide a more varied front page.

Issue: Sometimes, when scrolling or reading, the screen jumps up. Making it very difficult to read comments.

Improvement: Open post by clicking on the text, not just title and comment button, makes it easier on phones.

And collapseing comment chains, which makes it easier to scroll and read posts with a lot of comments, especially if some comment chains are not relevant to you.

@[email protected] There are a lot of federation issues I've seen between lemmy.world and other instances.

I can't seem to subscribe to any communities from fanaticus.social or midwest.social. I made an account on fanaticus.social and can't subscribe the other way either.

There was a delay of days for https://midwest.social/post/689124 and https://lemmy.world/post/174998 to start syncing and they are still out of sync. (These have synchronized since my post here)

When browsing in a fullscreen window the available themes only use about 25% of the horizontal screen space for content, and each post uses up a large amount of vertical space, with most of it being wasted space. Something more compact like old.reddit would be nice.

I am very new to Lemmy.world. I have noticed though there is no icon displayed on firefox for the bookmark (but there is for Chrome / DuckDuckGo browser).

Edit 2023-07-02 - For me this appears to have been fixed :)

• The message about choosing a language when making a post is not clear. Like, is selecting a language good or bad for visibility versus using the default "undetermined."

• What are the best practices for uploading an image on a post here, what about technical posts that need a gallery, gifs, mp4, etc.?

• as far as possible sub communities: astrophotography, telescopes, bicycle, bikewrench, arduino, esp32, hardware hacking, fedora, Linux hardware, and electrical engineering were some I regularly browsed or participated in on deddit. Not that these are needed, but I wish I could drag these communities over here

Search by community is not working. If you go to search page, and select a community and click search, it will search in all communities anyway.

On Android Client Jerboa v0.0.37 & 36 "Server version (0.1.4 is underthe minimum supported version (0.18). Please inform your administrator and login to another instance, or sign out and use the default instance."

On other android clients: Liftoff & Lemur: lemmy.world cannot be found as an instance.

Federation not always working; Apparently not everything gets synced all the time. This needs troubleshooting.

I thought I was suffering from this, but then I added English to my profile languages, and suddenly many posts on other instances that I could not see before were now visible.

I'm noticing a weird UI issue that makes it sometimes look like a new comment is attached to the wrong post.

For instance, just now I posted a comment on this thread, then went away from my computer and came back a couple minutes later. My browser was now displaying content from this different post but with my new comment attached to it.

Refreshing makes it evident that the comment is actually on the right post, though.

This is all using the default UI on lemmy.world, from a current Chrome browser.

Anyone else seen this sort of thing?

I think lemmy.world need to up the "Federation worker count" under the server settings. The more data that needs to be federated, the higher this number should be.

v18 released today, when can we expect the update to be rolled out here?

EDIT: Not a demand, just a genuine question, sorry if that came off abrasive

Request: allow a setting where we can turn off auto-load new posts. The front page resets every time it automatically loads new posts. It can be disruptive.

The rapid scrolling when viewing new or hot makes the site almost unusable. The issue for this is closed and the author says it has landed in main and will be available in 0.18. Do we have plans to upgrade? RC1 was released today. Thanks!

(I'm going to put one feature/issue in each comment to make it easier to discuss each topic individually, hope that's ok)

Known Issue: Probably a lemmy-wide issue. When new users sign up, there's no error message for "username has been taken", "username too short/long" or any other exception. You have to do trial-and-error to figure out how to get past the sign-in screen. Some sort of exception handling and user message would help greatly.

Immediate workaround would be to put something on the signup page to explain this ("username has to be between X to Y characters; if you see a spinning icon forever, chances are the username was taken already")

I am trying to move some of my posts from my community on reddit to here, and they are very long. I am able to post short posts, but not long ones. It gives me that spinning circle after I hit post, and I have waited 10 minutes and it hasn't posted. Works great for shorter things. Is there a character limit im hitting or maybe a spam filter since everything of mine is new?

Any chance we could have thumbnails show up on the index page?

Edit: On second thought, thumbnails work as long as your post is an image you uploaded. But it doesn't pull up og:images it seems, leading to those blank squares.

My homepage keeps dynamically adding posts so when I scroll, it loses my place on the page. Is there a setting that I'm missing here?

(I'm going to put one feature/issue in each comment to make it easier to discuss each topic individually, hope that's ok)

Enhancement requests: Again, might be better addressed lemmy-wide, but as a mod, I think there is no way to "sticky" or "pin" a reply to an existing thread, so that it stays at the top. This would be useful for "official" replies in the voice of a moderator, and I imagine it will be useful in future if mods ever need to lock posts and have to explain why.

Would love to see 2-factor authentication (app-based) implemented at some point. Not a pressing issue right now, but once everything stabilizes I think it would be a valuable security feature long-term.

Uploaded images autorotate, and I couldn't find how to manually rotate it prior to postinf. I'm using web/android if it matters

Some issues I've seen, mostly related to interactions with mastodon. I generally use Mastodon more so I've been playing with it.

1. I can follow a lemmy community on my mastodon account but all the posters do not show their avatar. (actually i just checked again and my avatar shows up, but others don't, so perhaps there is a long delay?)

2. I replied to a lemmy post on mastodon, and it showed up in lemmy, but when I'm logged in to lemmy and I try to post a reply to that it never publishes, the "post" button becomes the spinner and never makes the reply. This post for reference. This is the only one that feels like a bug.

3. when someone on another lemmy instance makes a post on our community, a mastodon toot goes out, but it links to their post on their community. It makes it a little odd to follow a link and it takes me to another instance than the one hosting the community. Maybe this isn't a bug, just kinda annoying, kinda fediverse in general it's tough to bounce between instances. Example. Ok making that link, it's clear that the "post" originated from the instance. I guess this is just how it works. Message Board systems are a bit more tricky than twitter-style systems.

4. When I make a post, it's got a warning Warning: If you deselect Undetermined, you will not see most content. and I have no idea what this is talking about.

5. I wish the community page would let me sort the rows by Subscribers.

Would love the ability to set a time for a post to publish. I've been posting a lot of news articles to /c/texas and I don't want users to feel like its spamming. If I could set a publish time that would be awesome

Lemmy is an interesting alternative to Reddit. I like the fact that it uses instances, which means that communities can in theory exist without getting nuked.

I haven't been here too long, but here are some things I would like to see:

1. When sorting posts by categories (especially by new), add the ability to pause real time updates.
2. In the profile section, add a checkbox to unblur NSFW content permanently.

Would it be possible to implement multifactor authentication as an optional log-in step? Preferably supporting authenticator app and hardware tokens rather than just SMS as SMS is now considered an insecure authentication method.

Might be more of a question than a "known issue" or "request" but, do you want individual users to be able to see the modlog for the entire Lemmy.world instance? For instance I can see not only who has been added/removed as a moderator, but what posts/comments have been removed/restored.

But also, thank you for running this, and also for having posts like this up which greatly help people like me know you're working on stuff.

Rarely the web version is laggy and things I'm not intending to click are clicked. Just now, a "Report Created" notification appeared after posting a comment - I'm sorry if something was actually reported, and I have no idea what that even was.

First off, thanks for running this! It is spectacular how quickly this took off once the Reddit Apocalypse started. Second, anybody having problems upvoting/downvoting on the main page? I click the arrow to vote and it flashes, but then it goes back to gray. If I go into the actual post, I can vote okay, but not from the main page.

Test comment; doing some federation testing with admins of other servers.

When creating an account, it should show a dialogue saying check your email for verification. Right now it doesn't show anything which is confusing for new users who are trying to login for the first time.

Dear @[email protected] ,

From my personal opinion, i would like to add 2 QoL improvements.

• The ability to go back to the community pages, with clicking on the empty area of a thread ( maybe like what Reddit implements ). The reason is that we can quickly navigate to another post
• A Scroll to Top / Back to Top Button

But this is just a suggestion based on my personal experience using Lemmy

Thank you :D

Getting lots of 'timeout' today.

On the main page, it seems like there's a stream of stuff always loading. How do I pause it?

On Jerboa app on Android, the feed/dashboard/frontpage has tiny font size, and when opening a post, the font size is huge. Changing the font size in settings affects both at the same time.

Issue:

Is it just me, or has "Hot" not refreshed with any new posts in over a day? I know there are posts coming in, but my Subscribed, Local, and All feeds have been static when sorting by "Hot".

edit: I think it's fixed on my end. I'm finally seeing newer stuff when sorting by Hot

Up- and downvoting appears to be borked on this instance specifically. If I hit the buttons, they light up, my upvote is counted - and a split second later it disappears and the button greys out again.

If I reload the page sometimes the vote got counted in the background, sometimes it didn't.

This appears to affect other parts of the UI as well. Most of the time I expand an image, it expands for a split second, then the UI resets and the image is small again.

Would it be possible to have replies in the notifications automatically be marked as "read" when I interact with them (by upvoting, for example)? Sure, clicking "mark all as read" is only one extra click, but it would make it just that little bit more seamless.

It would be very nice if communities could set a default post language that user can override. Most communitieswould want their post in the same language anyway and scrolling trough the list to select a post language every time is pretty annoying especially on mobile

Also my verification email went to spam/junk would be nice to have a disclaimer about that if it isn't possible to fix atm

How long should it take for a community to fully federate? There is [email protected] which is missing posts from the last 3 days vs https://lemmy.ml/c/usmlr.

Someone has probably mentioned it already but Jerboa is giving me this error when trying to use lemmy.world

• (low priority) on this page: https://lemmy.world/post/36032 the vote count is all over the place each time I view it while logged in. I promise I'm not such a snowflake that votes really matter to me. I'm more concerned about the way this will impact new user confidence on the platform when their engagement feedback is questionable. Someone that doesn't know any better may assume that the fluctuating numbers they see are faked to improve engagement and retention. Over the hours since I made the linked post, the votes seem to fluctuate between something like 20-25 on some page views, 40-60 on others, some are around 200-220, and others are ranging from 400-420. It seems random and uncorrelated as far as I can tell. Like selecting a reply from someone on my account, and viewing, does not seem to show the count as it was when they replied. I thought maybe it was fluctuating based on Local versus All instances, but that doesn't seem consistent either. Just scrolling down the page and back up to the counter after a few minutes can live update and change the count. I am viewing from a Chromium derivative Vanadium on mobile/Graphene OS (AOSP/live updates and current).

• secondly, I tried reposting a short 32 second mp4 clip and get an error, something about json. Is there a way to do video here? I could try setting up an account on your peertube if that works for cross posting, or I could use my workstation to convert the file to a gif if that will work. What is the best way to post something like this? (https://old.reddit.com/r/lifehacks/comments/yxz1jl/upcycled_soapbox_life/)

• I've tried to post this message a half dozen times here and have had no luck...until now. Okay, this one is probably because I got to this page after clicking the link to here from the link on the following page: https://lemmy.world/post/37906 For some reason this sequence makes this page (I am editing this post on now) act weird. It adds the 'you need to login' banner at first but then it goes away. The prompt to add a comment comes up, but oddly the preview button is missing in this instance. To make this comment stick to the post I had to go to the Lemmy.world homepage and select this post directly. Then I could copy and paste the message, could see the preview button, and posting stuck. If you see this, editing works too,.. apparently.

(I'm going to put one feature/issue in each comment to make it easier to discuss each topic individually, hope that's ok)

Enhancement requests: Not sure if this is better addressed lemmy-wide or here, but: New users may not know the difference between instances. Would having the "Communities" tab default to All instances be better than Local instances?

here is just a random list of features/improvements i would like to see

• save sorting preferences in comment sections. right now it defaults to hot.
• improve the hot/active algorithms. at the moment they don't seems to actually show popular posts like their reddit hot/popular counterparts. could be a symptom of being much smaller, but i never see any of the lemmy communities i follow that aren't the biggest ones, and on reddit i can see the small communities i follow.
• better syncing between instances. i also use kbin, and that seems to have issues with cross content at times. i can't see comments sometimes, and votes are completely different on both platforms.
• more granular "Top X" filters
• search by date range, and various other improvements to search. (anything is better than reddit search, but the ability to search this platform is probably more important than people realize)
• more embed integrations for things like gifs and youtube videos. generally, try and keep people on the site.
• open links in a new tab by default. on mobile
• a back button on mobile, not a menu button.
• account/community migration/merging
• community themes, and the ability to turn them off.

this last one isn't really a request, it's more of an ultimatum.

• whatever the fuck new.reddit.com is/does/looks like, DON'T DO THAT. make this site look as much like old.reddit.com as possible and never change that.

Federation issue: local posts not showing when following an account from Mastodon/Calckey/Alloma. To be verified if this is lemmy.world specific

This is a limitation of Lemmy and the devs don't seem interested in adding that feature.

I've been trying to post something in c/casualconversation, but after clicking 'post', it gets stuck - spinning for hours, actually, and my message won't get through.

It could be useful to have sub-communities like Usenet had newsgroup hierarchies. E.g. within c/tools there could be c/tools/drills, c/tools/saws, or whatever. On deaddit (formerly called reddit) they end up making dozens of related top level subreddits scattered around but I think it is good to add some kind of organizational structure.

Former reddit user making the switch the best I can.

• Found this guide and made an account on Lemmy.world
• went on my merry way and found several communities here and there
• tried to install the mobile client Jerboa and got blocked because the server is older than the app version — and for some reason the former versions crash on my phone

➡ am I right to assume that the end user risks losing its app mobile access everytime there's a update from the app and / or the server?

• in the end I ended up downloading Thunder which allowed me to login to lemmy.world without version issues

When you reply to a comment and the first thing you press is the "quote" button you get this in the box:
undefined>
The "undefined" part of that before the ">" shouldn't be there. Causes a lot of comments to use the quote symbol wrong.

Enhancement requests:

1. Please add the little eyeball icon at login, to make the password field readable. That makes it easier to type difficult ones.

2. It would be good to have a search option to search just the current thread, rather than the whole site or whole community.

Thanks!

Issue with lemmy in general: there's no error message when your username is taken, or password doesn't meet the requirements. I had to figure out by trial and error why my application didn't go through

I've also faced a decent amount of lag and freezing, but so far nothing too dramatic or can't be refreshed. Just kinda wrote it off as growing pains.

Any idea why I can't open https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]? Mander.xyz should be federated. I just get 404: couldnt_find_community