What does Lemmy lack?

djtech@lemmy.world to Lemmy@lemmy.ml – 58 points –

Just wanted to ask: what do you not like in Lemmy (Lemmy as communities, server and clients)?

This is just a way for me to get some feedback from the community.

74

Populated niche communities. The Reddit Exodus created a big blip that now, a month later, well it seems to have died down.

A few thousand people gave Lemmy a shot, and after lemmy.world had issues with the traffic, and went down a lot this past thirty days, I think people just stopped trying.

This is the best Reddit alternative out there and still it's got such poor adoption because it's so different under the hood.

I myself feel I'm missing out on so much content here as was available on Reddit, but I'm trying to actually make a difference by not going back.

Yup, just gonna keep participating here, Lemmy will continue to improve over time and get sleeker and more appealing, and we'll be ready the next time reddit fucks something up

I'm actually taking my time to get into it. Many of us are. I'm gonna start contributing in my niche community as soon as I feel confortable enough. And just yesterday I actually saw thst community had several new posts: this things take simply time...

To name a few big ones for me:

  • spoilers

  • flairs/tagging

  • a better mod portal

  • automod bots

  • database stability

  • wiki support

  • saved posts being in the ORDER I SAVED THEM not the order they were posted. That's basic functionality man!

ITT:

  • Following users

  • better crossposting

  • more users ( I think the other issues cause this one a bit)

Spoilers work, do it like this:

::: spoiler Some visible text And the text you want hidden :::

::: spoiler Some visible text
And the text you want hidden
:::

Works on web and on Jerboa.

Yes, again, thay is not the spoiler I'm talking about, I'm talking about a post thay specifically has a built in spoiler tag, like the NSFW tag

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Tagging other users already is a feature in Connect, spoilers (in textbodies) work on all apps that I used and bots are getting made right now and it is only a matter of time until they are as ubiquitous as on reddit.

Not tagging other users, tagging posts, flairs. Spoilers via markdown yes, but no tag to mark something as a show spoiler.

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I feel like the main lacking point would be a small user base. I'm new to Lemmy as of a few months ago since the Reddit API changes. I wish more people knew of the other options out there other than Reddit. It's really only a minority of people who left and jumped to Lemmy.

I suppose the big ones for me:

  • The ability to follow people which would unlock a lot more interoperability between other Fediverse services.
  • A wiki for each community.

edit: And

  • Better moderation tools, especially merging or moving posts.

Kbin has follower support, it's just hit or miss an which federated instances update properly, for example misskey doesn't show me posts newer than a week old

Kbin has follower support

Which suggests it's doable for Lemmy, I imagine it just isn't top of their list as they want to make sure it all integrates nicely with the current set-up.

  • individual option to block instances on your own account

  • something similar to what reddit calls multireddits which are basically custom feed collections that allows you to save certain sibreddits to it to only have a feed of specific subreddits you can open up and browse

Video posts are something I kind of miss, particularly for gaming communities to share clips of gameplay

A way to block porn instances

Yeah and can you even block instances at all? I feel like every 10 posts I have to block another community that uses another language. With reddit I never had this issue

Doesnt nsfw option work

It does but titles still show up like "pegging my sister" or "5 nights inside Freddy" so I would like the option to block. I'm using liftoff but it looks like blocking doesn't work

Right, then we hope to get a feature to be able to ban communities. I guess there is no issue opened for that(as far as i can remember), it would be great to open a issue for that.

Alernately, a convenient way to view only SWF posts, both SFW & NSFW posts, or only NSFW posts ...

For that last, and I am sure many other uses, a way to only see subscribed communities from a given instance - we shouldn't have to create new accounts on every instance we consider useful enough to do this, and for those instances, they shouldn't have to bear the burden of everyone who considers them so useful creating accounts with them and visitting them directly every time the fancy strikes; That's effectively just punishing the most useful and popular instances with additional server costs.

EDIT: Forgot to mention: Lemmyverse.com community search already handles NSFW exactly as I am suggesting.

I mean… it’s clearly β€œusers”.

The lemmy world is organically growing, we are seeing an uptic in users every month on most instances, even excluding bots. I think as the experience gets less glitchy, lemmy will continue to get more popular.

As a site admin, I really wish it was easier to modify the content on the front page. We've had some interesting ideas over here, like linking to some simple online games and posting high scores for the site, or maybe just adding some analytics boxes to the site. But for us that's difficult.

A lot of our ideas come from a shared experience in BBSes from the 90s, where they had game doors, ascii art, and other fun site-specific elements. Technology has changed, but there are modern equivalents to all of those things that we wish we could implement.

Bring back Legend of the Red Dragon.

Heck yeah! I can't believe how popular that game was. Every time I bring up this era, everyone talks about it.

I was a big Tradewars 2002 fan, myself. You can still play it, which is what made me start to think about connecting it to Lemmy somehow. That, and Nethack.

I'm wondering if you could hook that into the idea of a wiki because an instance could have one as well as a community.

I'm thinking, in the same way a community has a collapsible panel about it (which could become the front page of its wiki), so an instance could have the same. You could then link through from there to other wiki pages or external resources as you liked.

Let me group up custom lists of communities, just like custom subreddits on Reddit

This is my number one. I hate having everything in one subscription list, battling each other for my attention. My local communities can't stand up to lemmyworld or beehaw communities in my sub list, and "local" puts all local communities in, most of which don't interest me.

That's just one example though, and it's not all about instances. News about energy policy can't battle with world politics, so keeping the two in separate lists is important to me even though they are both remote sets of communities for me.

Some niche communities are lacking, though I don’t see them existing/growing without a large increase in userbase, since they’re you know, niche. Cities for instance… some I used to frequent on reddit exist on Lemmy, but are naturally not as active. Also I used to talk in (hooray) a couple subs about chronic illnesses which are like, 1% or less of the population, maybe more since sometimes it would be family members or parents talking. Celiac, type 1 diabetes. Same as cities there are communities about those but they are not very active yet.

Reddit used to be niche, things take time

Sure, I'm not surprised since as noted, these are niche interests. I could contribute by posting articles or writing content myself to help it grow.

Dedicated users posting is the best way to slowly grow communities like that. It's much less likely others will post if it seems like a ghost town, but if someone is posting others are much more likely to join in. And at the very least there'll be content to engage with when new people find it.

yeah, for example.... when reddit was beginning they made fake accounts and posted to pretend there were users. Thankfully lemmy/kbin/mastodon etc are past that point, for the most part, but for certain communities I might as well be there talking to myself. I don't mean that as a bad thing!

  • Filtering posts with keywords and hiding posts manually.

Certain topics cause unnecessary anxiety, on reddit they were easy to avoid with RES. Here the only way to remove a post from haunting you from your timeline is to block the poster, which is bit overkill.

Could you explain a little bit this concept please? This will go to write a document that describes the next milestones for Lemmy.

  • Filtering posts with keywords

User can specify keywords that are used to filter and exclude the users own subscription timeline from posts that include the words in the post-topic.

For example: User adds the keyword "died" in the settings to a filter list. The topic "Great actor of movie X has died" will now not appear in the feeds. There also could be a more advanced version of this that allows to assign keywords to different communities.

  • Hiding posts manually

In every post, the tools in the "three dot overflow"-menu should include an option for "Hide post", which makes that post disappear from the feed.

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Like others have said, it's the niche communities. I still go to reddit some times because of small subreddits like r/progressionfantasy, or the subreddits for a book series.

I don't like pages, I want infinity scrolling. I want bigger previews on images without having to open the thread.

  • The ability to post the same post to multiple community's
  • a native video player / video support

The ability to post the same post to multiple community’s

Unless I've misunderstood, you can do that now.

I think they mean a cross-post mechanism. You can do it with a link manually, but it's a smooth experience on Reddit to jump down a cross post chain.

You can do it through the web interface. There's a little icon with two overlapping pages.

Cool, must be new then.

I've been using it for a while.

Huh, looks like it's more than a year old, so I just totally missed it.

It didn't help that I mostly use Jerboa, which doesn't seem to have that feature.

I actually made a bunch of feature requests, there are a few reddit enhancement suite features i wanted but what i want most is the ability to incrementally read the comments of a post by marking comments as read (really useful if there is a subject i am particularly interested in or is particularly meaningful).

Lack of ads. And I mean that in a transparancy way, people are going to promote stuff ('look at this cool project i've been working on', 'someone needs money in this crowdfunding, after i tell you this long, heartbreaking story') it would be nice to see markings if a post has a direct benefactor and who that benefactor would be, to decide early if you want to engage.

Have federation happen on the instance level. What I mean is, the admin should be able to federate with the instance itself and all its communities.

Dunno if this has been mentioned before, but I'd like a way to favourite a community, so that all its post will show up on the main page feed until I've seen them. Because I miss out on posts on some of the smaller communities I follow unless I go to that community's page.

That way I'd be able to see 'em and try and make those smaller instances grow by commenting and upvoting.

A design that scales. Forwarding every like, post and comment to all federated servers will not scale well.

Maybe a little facetious on my part, but putting all of this on one line(I keep hitting Cancel when I meant to Post or Save an Edit). Easy fix would be to remove the word "Select", &/or even replace the word "language" with the currently active language(En-US, in my case).

Lemmy lacks luscious long licorices. Luscious long licorices are lacked by lemmy. What would lemmy lack if it didn't lack luscious long licorices?