Lemmy User Feedback and Improvement Thread: Share Your Complaints, Suggestions, and Ideas
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!
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.
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
There's got to be a better way to do cross posts. When people/bots crosspost, my "All" feed gets cluttered with multiple copies of the same post. Maybe something like a drop-down showing all the instances and communities it's posted to.
I don't know if this was requested before but I really want there to be a way to see all comments throughout crossposted threads. It sucks that there are so many crossposts that have like 1-2 comments each. I want to see all discussion about a post at the same time.
I've used Lemmy for a while and just recently felt like I was missing a feature for the first time: I'd love if there was some kind of mod mail functionality. One of my posts was removed by a moderator and I wanted to ask why, but I obviously didn't know which mod did it, so I just randomly messaged someone from the list. There should be a more "elegant" way to do this, like some kind of functionality that allows a user to send a message directly to the community or the moderation team itself.
Option for default comment sorting. you can change the default sort only for posts, but not for comments, comments always sorted by Hot, and you have to manually change it each time you open comments.
In Voyager you can set this up, but it would be useful in the webui as well.
Every day for the last 15 months I have been hitting Top on every. single. post. Every day I hope that tomorrow will be the day this completely obvious missing feature has been added.
On a related note, threads ought to be able to have the default sorting changed at least by a mod, if not by the user who posted them. For example, the recent hurricane megathreads ought to have been defaulting to sorting by new.
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.
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.
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🤗
It would be nice if there was a way to handle instance/user migrations. If an instance gets their domain name taken away, there's no way AFAIK for the admin to say "Here's our new location, with a verifiable signature". Likewise there's no way for a user AFAIK to move their account with a verifiable signature that the new one is still them. Ideally this could all happen automatically with signatures getting synced automatically and all that.
I'm sure it would be a lot of work and no idea if ActivityPub would get in the way, but it would give people a lot more assurance that they didn't pick a server that will screw them over by going down.
It totally would. In ActivityPub, all objects (like users and posts) have an identifier that includes the domain name. For instance, your ID is https://midwest.social/u/m_f. That's what identifies your user. There is no way to change an ID - the point of an ID is after all that it stays the same and still refers to the same entity. This is a pretty serious limitation of ActivityPub right now unfortunately.
I think there's a FEP that could (or fixes) this. To my understanding ID can be any URI, so there are better ways. I guess it's hard because it would brake a lot of stuff or how mastodon is build.
A mute community in addition to block community. There are communities i may not want to see in my feed, but I might want to look at them. Currently my only option is to block and then offi want to check them out i have to unblock.
One thing you can do there is to take advantage of federation and jump to an instance where you are not logged in, which will then display all of the comments. On the web UI, the multicolored Fediverse icon works fantastic for this purpose, as it will jump straight to the comment that you want to see (although the hidden ones would be below that, or perhaps you would rather go to the post itself).
I will suggest filtering, by term and by source URL. I think it would help customize individual feeds, making it easier and perhaps more comfortable navigating the news.
Example A: term filtering: This should be fairly obvious. Say I'm a Linux user who could care less about KDE. But people keep gushing over it in the Linux subs I subscribe to, and the damn developers keep pushing new releases that also get posted. Argh! Filter out posts (maybe even comments) that mention KDE, Bob's your uncle. And I can still enjoy all those delicious GNOME posts. Definitely not a real world inspired scenario.
Example B: URL filtering: Simply(!) filtering out link posts by source URL. Not a fan of Fox News and/or WaPo? Filter out one site or the other by root URL, like *.foxnews.com or *.washingtonpost.com.
Me, I'd gladly filter out all and any YouTube links unseen by default. That's a constant noise generator I could genuinely live without. But I digress.
I hope the examples illustrate my point because I could clearly never explain a feature request succinctly nor to the point.
Yeah, more or less right. On Mastodon I'm a heavy filter user, so loads of terms and hashtags just GTFO. I don't see anything near that capability baked into Lemmy.
And I have to say, the more I think about it, the more important link source filtering is. Given how many posts are links to external sites I think it would be a great feature to sift out the chaff before you even have the chance to roll your eyes at it!
I don’t see it mentioned, so maybe it’s not a popular thing, but the ability to tag a post. Often time this can be annoying, but it can help in filtering posts in certain types of communities.
Serves me right for typing w/o my glasses on! I guess there could be a fun answer to what “raging a post” might entail, but I can’t think of one. Corrected.
Show saved items in order they were saved, not original post date. If I come across and save something from 6 months ago, when I go back into saved items, it's sorted way back i stead of being the first item in the sort list.
This was supposed to be fixed in a server update, but doesn't seem to be.
Actual functional user blocking. I don't want users being able to see my comments and reply to them when I have blocked them and I was totally surprised when they did.
Yep, and it wouldn't be very far back in my history if you want to see it. My last comment in that convo started with "ugh". I was talking about transgender issues with someone who was extremely argumentative and kept strawmanning my beliefs so I told them in no uncertain terms that I was done with the conversation and blocked them. Later I decided to unblock them and discovered that they had replied not only to that final comment continuing to tell me I'm a bad person for their strawman interpretation of what I said, but to another comment I made in a different thread.
So this person who is actively insulting me also has the ability to follow me around and continue insulting me, and blocking them just makes me unable to defend myself.
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.
Help promote longer discussions by using the sidebar to display comments initially sorted by "New". Give options to filter comments by Community, Local, Subscribed, Mod View or All.
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).
I think by default bots should not be allowed anywhere. But if that's a bridge too far, then their use should have to be regularly justified and explained to communities. Maybe it should even be a rule that their full code has to be released on a regular basis, so users can review it themselves and be sure nothing fishy is going on. I'm specifically thinking of the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot (I know, I harp on it too much). It's basically a spammer bot at this point, cluttering up our feeds even when it can't figure out the source, and providing bad and inaccurate information when it can. And mods refuse to answer for it.
Even large social media platforms have trouble dealing with bots, and with AI advancements, these bots will become more intelligent. It feels like a hopeless task to address. While you could implement rules, you would likely only eliminate the obvious bots that are meant to be helpful. There may be more sophisticated bots attempting to manipulate votes, which are more difficult to detect, especially on a federated platform.
For sure, it's not an easy problem to address. But I'm not willing to give up on it just yet. Bad actors will always find a way to break the rules and go under the radar, but we should be making new rules and working to improve these platforms in good faith, with the assumption that most people want healthy communities that follow the rules.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
There's currently no way to delete an uploaded image.
That's especially problematic since pasting any image into a reply box auto-uploads it. So if your finger slips and you upload something sensitive, or if you want to take down something you uploaded previously, there's no way to do it.
What should happen is whenever you upload an image, the image and delete key get stored in some special part of your Lemmy account. Then from the Lemmy account management page you can see all your uploaded images and delete them individually or in bulk.
So it seems you can now do this- Profile, Uploads shows you all your uploads. Go Lemmy!
There is a new functionality for users to list all images they have previously uploaded, and delete them if desired. It also allows admins to view and delete images hosted on the local instance.
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
Has anyone suggested any feature related to word list filters? Like, blocking any community, comment, post or user with a certain term in their name/title?
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).
Not really. A reported comment rarely even gets evaluated in the context of what it's replying to, let alone a long history. It might make sense to allow a user report to link comment/post examples of why a user is toxic to the user report. I know there are a couple of users I would've used that for.
Would love to have more freedom with relation to reply notifications. Such as muting a comment or a post.
I believe there’s been github issues opened and closed for atleast the past year but it seems to not be a priority for the devs. If I had the disposible income to put a bounty on the feature I’d pay for it but well I’m poor as heck.
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. This challenge is further compounded for those who prioritize factors like low latency or specific content policies. Lemmy's architecture heavily favors instance-level configurations, leaving individual users with limited control over their experience. 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.
I agree, one thing that should be available when choosing an instance is to be able to easily tell the blocks from instances.
Also, IMHO, 90% of instance blocks are childish drama. Lots of instances with the same world view block each other because of admins fighting, and this problem is not exclusive to Lemmy, all activitypub platforms suffer from it.
The ideal model would be instances be more tolerable and use instance block as last resort only for SPAM or Crimes. And the user itself ban what they don't want to see.
I'm not sure on the technical aspect but I think "instance blocking" should be an OPT-IN message sent to users of the instance. For example, say lemmy.world wanted to block lemmy.ml, hexbear, and reddthat. Each instance is added to a "Suggested blocked instance" setting in your profile and a message is sent to the user notifying them the opt-in option is available. Could have a whole list with descriptions besides the instances for why the suggested block option is there. Users would be informed with an actionable option and not automatically opted in. Could just be a toggle-able switch list in user settings.
That just won't work. First and foremost, I won't be hosting illegal stuff, just so you can have your freedom. Think child porn and stuff. Happened multiple times on Lemmy and probably will happen again. If you haven't seen it, your admin most likely has and dealt with it.
And with stuff like Hexbear and other troll instances, I just don't want to deal with tens of reports a day, I simply block them because they're trolls.
If you want that kind of freedom, you have to create your own. I'm not gonna spend a significant amount of time on reports that can be avoided. And definitely not going to prison.
Example 1: when one side wants to bully the other, but the latter does not wish this, how do you solve this problem? Defederation it is then.
Example 2: when someone claims that the Tiananmen Square massacre did actually happen, that user gets blocked from all communities, including those they have never heard of, on lemmy.ml. This is not so rare - and this is straight from the Lemmy developers themselves, i.e. a feature not a bug. It does no good to pretend otherwise.
Example 3: when people refuse to label their kiddie porn properly, others must label it for them, or risk getting into trouble themselves, bc regardless of what some other website chooses to host, the federation model says that if your instance federates with it, then it is content that you are sharing as well. Though actually, I find the Fediverse mostly friendly in how it labels NSFW content, yet it refuses to label toxicity in a like manner - e.g. the brigading attempts organized on hexbear against other communities on different instances. If only a label could be affixed to Chapotraphouse, like "beware ye who choose to enter here...":-).
I find your comment extremely biased towards your own POV and desires, but overall there is much more subtlety and nuance in interpersonal connections, e.g. sometimes women choose the bear, and rather than say that it is "silly", it might behoove people to listen to why that choice may have been made?
Seems like there's basically no effort to address disinformation. I love the idea of the fediverse, but I've never told a single person I use it in well over a year because I'd be embarrassed if they ever visited and saw some of the content that gets upvoted here.
Literally had a Hexbear user double down advocating for violence towards America after I told them it’s not a constructive way to go about holding the leadership accountable.
It seems when a user is blocked and comments on a thread, any comments under that are also blocked. It should only be blocking that user, not the thread?
It would be hard to get the context, and you could totally misunderstood the thread, e.g. from your hidden comment everyone get that replies are sarcastic, but you don't.
Maybe an "temporarily unhide blocked user's comment and replies" button to show the whole thread.
True. Another aspect is if there are one’s own comments in that thread, they don’t show up either. (Of course they still do in the Comments account section)
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.
Normalized Scoring: Adjust post scores based on the instance's monthly active user count at the time of posting. However, this option cannot be implemented as the software does not keep track of the monthly active user count over time.
Community-Specific Normalized Scoring: Adjust post scores based on each community's monthly active user count at the time of posting. Unfortunately, this option cannot be implemented as the software does not keep track of the monthly active user count for each community over time.
Visibility-Based Ranking: Factor in how often a post is shown to users by tracking the number of times a post appears in users' feeds and calculating an "engagement rate" by dividing votes by views. Rank "Top of All Time" posts using this engagement rate. This option cannot be implemented as the software does not keep track of post views or the number of times a post appears in users' feeds.
The one feature that I'd love to see IMO: make it so Lemmy doesn't require Javascript to work to even view the main page. Come on we are supposed to be recovering the good web times of the '90s, why do I need a react json vue left_pad framework to produce a list of items that can just be consistently delivered by a HTML <ul>?
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.
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.
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.