Asklemmy @lemmy.ml

11mo ago

What is something lemmy can improve upon?

161 comments

I would like to see recommendations for communities based on my communities. It's not trivial to solve, but discoverability isn't great right now.
- Problem here is also that your instance may not know about all communities from the instances you're connected to. This could probably also be improved.
  
  Yes, that's what I mean by not trivial, a centralized system can do analysis like this a lot easier. But even on your own instance, they could find the N users with the most overlapping subscriptions and check which communities they follow to give you recommendations.
- I guess the 'simple' way of doing this would be adding tags to communities like 'art' 'hobbies' 'sport' 'football' etc. This might then let the app suggest others based on the tags you are subscribed to.
  It would probably still require some AI/analytics to work out the links based on user activity in different communities/tags but I think it would make it easier to group interests and promote smaller communities.
  It could also improve Lemmy visibility in Masterdon if the tags are used as hashtags or something. (Would require more work)
  
  Kbin lists "related magazines" which are similar communities in the fediverse. Not sure how it works but I think it may be based on hashtags like this.
- Recommendation algorithms are a big reason for the enshitification of other social media. You don't need to be connected to everything everywhere all at once. Enjoy your handful of small communities.
  
  I don't want random posts to appear in my feed from communities I haven't subscribed to, but I want to have a feature that shows me suggestions for communities when I ask for it. That's a big difference. Right now it's (too) hard to find these communities.
  
  Recommendation algorithms are fine as long as they’ce user-centric and opt-in.
- Exactly this. I like how substack works and have no idea if it’s doable or not.
- Hashtags could possibly help with this. When making a post, a user can add hashtags which categorize the content. One can then search hashtags, or subscribe to them to find new communities. Probably not as passive as you'd be looking for, though.

Split NSFW into NSFW and NSFL.
- More options around that in general. I would love a spoiler flag that does the same blur as NSFW but isn't filtered out by the 'show NSFW' checkbox.
- It would probably be better to have a more general tag system and then NSFW and NSFL could just be examples of tags.
  Although NSFW really serves the extra purpose of "18+" which is important to have for legal reasons.
  
  Maybe a setting for each tag for whether it qualifies as NSFW? That way you could have multiple tags that would be filtered as NSFW for different classes of content, which could enable individual users to only filter one of the tags if they only want to avoid something specific.

An option to view all comments from crossposts when browsing a post. It's annoying how you can see a post that's been crossposted 5 times and wonder where the comments are.
- Reading some of these is making me really appreciate @ernest.
  We have this one, it's handy. There's a list of crossposts and how many comments each has, you can click to where the acive discussions are.
  
  Oh hey, I had no idea ernest was back. Great to have him back.

Cross instance post/comment deletion.
Sometimes I just don't want my comments to live forever and deleting shouldn't be impossible.
- I don't know, man, your comments are works of art.
  
  Nah, not mine, piss takes and sarcasm mostly.
- The fediverse is not set up for that. Everything is public and could be saved by an instance admin
- Sometimes I just don't want my comments to live forever and deleting shouldn't be impossible.
  Due to the nature of the Fediverse, this will be very difficult if not impossible to implement/enforce.
- detection
  You meant deletion? This is already implemented about as well as it can be.

Reports categories based on both the community, the instance of the community + the user to reduce report noise between mod actions and admin actions.
Post tags, to label content within a community.
Better language support, clearly indicating which ones are allowed when submitting something in the language dropdown, as well as basic language detection support.
When the instance is using pictrs, add a section in the user's settings to see all the uploaded pictures in that account, with the ability to delete any of them.
Better accessibility / a11y support for uploaded images with alt-text.
Support for svg-based emojis
For mods, the ability to make a pinned post made by one of the mods editable by other mods, which would be useful for FAQs, etc.
The ability to subscribe/follow a specific user, not just communities.
Passkeys support as a 2FA method.
Some basic builtin automod action, such as blocking known keywords from spammers from being posted, not just showing as removed as when using the slur filter in the admin settings.
EDIT: Something I just thought of
A URI protocol handler to refer to communities, users, post and comments in an instance-independant way (ie: lemmy://u/mp3@lemmy.ca, lemmy://c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml, lemmy://c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/p/1234567) or another syntax that makes more sense. That way you could let the OS redirect the query to the software of your choice, and define your home instance there.
Now there are some issues to figure out before defining the URI handler, like how to refer to a post or comment that will redirect to the appropriate one on your home instance since post and comment currently have a unique ID on each instance, which makes them hard to directly address without doing some kind of conversion.
- Tags for posts would be great!

The ability to see all the communities if you search them up without having to find it via lemmyverse.net and inserting the specific fedi url to the search bar. It's a crucial thing for an average Joe, no matter it's due to how the fedi protocol works.
- Hmm I only browse in mobile voyager and there's an "all" filter. Is that not available?
  
  That 'all' is all of the communities and posts your server knows about. You are on a pretty big (I think?) server, so it's probably pretty good. For people on smaller servers like the one I'm on, it won't have a lot of the smaller niche communities on there as no one from my server has ever visited them.
  If I made a new community on my instance and posted stuff there, you wouldn't see it in your 'all' feed unless someone from lemme.ee visited the new community first.

Guessing fixing child porn propagation isn't the highest priority?
Make it easier for server admins to connect/link to the child porn hash databases, scripts for autobans + deletion of any content, flagging + notify to other servers etc.
- This should actually be #1. Last thing I want for the fediverse is for it to become a CP haven because we lack proper moderation. I recently received an amazing presentation on the issue of CP distribution from a seasoned officer, and CP is a genuine and dangerous issue. Go look up what sextortion is.

Honestly I feel like Lenny needs flairs more than anything
- I agree. It's one of the number 1 features I miss from Reddit.
- This: https://github.com/LemmyNet/rfcs/pull/4

Moderation tools. They need to drop literally everything else they are working on and build robust moderation tools for community owners. Nothing else matters more than this.
- Could you link to the issues in the lemmy issue tracker, so I can know which ones you're referring to?

Allow communities that contain the same content but exist on different instances to show each others content as if they were one community.
- That sounds like it'd be fantastic for reading but, depending on how it's implemented, hell for posting.
  Lemmy already aggregates posts from communities you follow into one feed. If it allowed the creation of an arbitrary number of sub-feeds configurable by the user, that would be incredible. But every user would have to build these on their own from scratch. Great for user choice, but no communities will come bundled by default, so small communities won't get a discovery boost.
  If instead there was some kind of first-class notion of a "supercommunity" offered on the server side, where it acted as a transparent view of other communities, that'd be a great visibility boost for small communities. But if you tried to post to it, which underlying community would it post to? You'd have to either designate a default community to receive posts (which would be unfair to every other community there), randomize where it goes to (which would be a quagmire, what if your post is allowed in half of the communities present but rule-breaking in the others?), burden the user with choosing (which would be hell if there are a lot), or simply make it read-only. I don't really like any of these. It also raises hairy questions about who will control which communities are and are not part of the group, how the groupings react to defeds, etc.
- Like multireddits on that other site
  
  Except multireddit were not shared accross users, making them largely irrelevant.
  On lemmy, the default view should be, if you go to /c/books, you get all books on all instances in a single place.
  Anything less will suffer the same downfall as reddit
- Yes, until that's the default, lemmy is destined to repeat the mistake of reddit

There NEEDS to be an account migration option, with not only settings but also my saved posts and comments, own posts and comments etc. If not possible, at least allow an export in the style of a gddpr dump from the likes of facebook etc. to allow import at a later time when implemented.
My instance is shutting down at the end of the month (~500 users) and there is no good way to export my data. I would not be surprised if some of the 500 get frustrated and stop with lemmy.
- Migrating posts and comments is not possible with activitypub, as that would be rewriting history. But you could open up an issue for a user data only export, as that wouldn't be too difficult to do.
  
  Thanks for your reply! I looked into it and #3976 seems to be pretty much that because the "import" part of it was shot down.
  I could create an issue for specifically gdpr style exports tho.
- You mean like Mastodon ?
  
  Also not resolved https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
- Speaking of which, a mechanism to manage posts from instances your account has previously migrated away from.

In-line translation features for non-English communities (in my case) would be very helpful and would exceed Reddit functionality, which is something I think Lemmy should strive toward
- Integration with DeepL API like Misskey would be cool!
- While we are speaking of it, please let users choose between languages (original and target) independently of system locale.
  Sometimes I encounter social media posts auto translated (probably through Google translate) but languages detection is messed up. And the best part is there isn't a menu to choose.
- This should really be implemented at either the browser or lemmy-ui/app level, not in the back end.
- Yes this would be amazing!

Here is a hopefully minor thing...
Reddit has multireddits where you can have a few that follows a certain selection of subreddits under a label. You can have multiple ones defined as well. Therefore, you can have a view for all things news (following multiple news things) without having to view those things on your main home feed (as well as any other defined topics that you can think of).
It would be nifty if such a thing could exist inside of Lemmy as well.
- We have something like this at Kbin, including the ability to make them public and subscribe to other peoples' public multis.
  It's really great, I hope Lemmy gets it.
  Edit: here is one of mine: https://kbin.social/c/Cinema
- There is this issue for it https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
- For now at least, if you use Sync you can have multiple accounts each with their own subscriptions and settings and switch between them at will.

I'd like to see more instances with 100-500 users.
I know that's a community thing, more than a Lemmy thing. I just don't feel like I have a wealth of choices. I'm still on lemmy.world and when I look around, I don't see a lot of medium-sized instances to migrate to.
- Try to join an instance that is related to your geographical location or your country or state. That should result in a more even spread than what we have right now.
  
  I’d love to see more country specific instances.
  
  I've looked. I find it hard to believe that there's no California or SF Bay instances, but I haven't found anything.

Not sure if this is Lemmy or the app I use, but I would like my saved content to appear in the order it was saved. It sucks when I save something old and am unable to find it when I look at my saved items.
- https://lemmy.ml/comment/9233196
  
  This is great news! Thanks!
- Omg yes! Was going to say this

Brigaders.
People with like 10 accounts that upvote themselves/downvote dissent.
- Kbin votes are public so we can see brigades in action.
  Apparently Lemmy votes are too but it's not accessible in the native interface, only from Kbin. Maybe a third party client will implement it.
  
  It's super obvious when it happens to you, but it's not obvious when you see it in the wild. It would be a great improvement to the site to just show the users who downvoted/upvoted.
- I also noticed sometimes after getting into an argument it's like they go through my profile and start downvoting everything. I feel like any vote that comes from someone's profile (rather than in the wild) should be flagged as suspicious because it feels like they're never genuine.
- That's a problem not a solution.

Users that want to talk about tv shows that I watch and more places to do so

I need a proper controversial sort option. I want to know where the juice is.
- What's wrong with the current controversial sort?
  
  Gives me stuff from months ago.

Duplicate posts in my feed
- I keep seeing 2 day old posts pretty high in the feed and it's gotten annoying.
  
  Yep I see that too. Not sure if the reader app plays any role in this, but I don’t think so.

Sort by two filters at once (top this day, controversial this week, ...)
Controversial and others are literally useless, its always the same posts

Where’s the multi-lemmies support

Saving is broken.
When showing a saved post or comment, show them in order of save instead of original post date. If I save an article, go to find it the next day, it's not there. Turns out it was sorted under 6mos ago when it was originally posted.
- I fixed that recently, it'll be in the next release.
  
  Woohoo! Thanks!

I'd love to have to specifically choose for my comment to have the mod flair rather than it always be present.

a huge chunk of content is based around video nowadays. so i would like to see video support
- I love video as much as the next person, but hosting a video platform is incredible expensive and potential difficult especially for a global audience.
  I think that might put a large burden on people hosting it. That isn't even talking about people abusing it for like copyrighted content.
  
  I've been adding some more support for torrents to try to get ahead of this.

I would like to be able to more effectively filter posts of languages i can’t understand. Using memmy i have been trying to filter posts by key word and entering common words in every language, but it’s not changed how much i scroll past, and it’s hard to determine if it’s effective at all.
- I just blocked a few foreign communities, maybe three of the biggest ones. solved it for me
- Usually these posts are in language specific communities and the best option then is to just block the community (or the whole instance, if the whole instance is language specific).
- Are your language preferences set on your account? (open your account settings on the website rather than an app)
  Or are these all posts with their language set to undefined?
  
  I had not set these options yet. But they are set now. I am keeping undefined, not sure all that i would lose without it
- Also the opposite. Allow the user to specify that they want to see ALL languages, regardless of which ones their instance supports. It seems weird that navigating to an instance without being logged in shows all posts but when you're logged in they get automatically filtered to the instance-supported languages.

Not a technical thing, but...
Better user interactions. I know not everyone came from reddit, but there are so many reddit-like interactions across Lemmy. I'm talking about not assuming good faith and jumping down people's throats. Low-effort comments (I'm guilty of this, too). The need to always be right and continue arguing for no reason.
It was tiring to see this on reddit over the years. But it's sad to see how much of that behavior has made its way to Lemmy.
With federation, however, there's not really a good way to solve this, since each instance, including self-hosted instances, determines their own moderation and "culture." But it would be something I'd like to see improved, even i we each have to do it ourselves.
On the technical side, absolutely mod tools. It's stunning how bad they are here. And I'm coming from reddit, where tools were poor.

Allow multiple groups per post (use them like tags). This would have some interesting implications regarding moderation and the handling of replies to the said post.
Having multiple identical posts in different groups with distributed replies doesn't feel ideal to me.
- Having multiple identical posts in different groups with distributed replies doesn’t feel ideal to me.
  I think this is actually a feature. You're essentially trying to centralize communities, but communities are decentralised just like instances.
  Why do we have multiple Technology communities? Because some people might like the mods or the rules in the other community better or maybe you can't even access one of the communities because your instance is defederated from the instance with that community.
  Just as one admin doesn't have monopoly on the Fediverse, no mod has monopoly on a community.
  Multiple communities is a feature, not a bug.
  
  I proposed an extension of the feature set. The current behaviour is still possible. You can use the added feature but you don't have to.
  The issue for me: The current landscape in lemmy has a lot of sparsely filled groups - I do not browse by group (filter by subscribed or all and sorted by new or hot).
  In this view multiple identical posts with distributed replies are shown. This adds redundancy in the comments and reduces clarity.
  Edit: The idea rises the question, how the ownership (or relation) of a post to the group and its replies should be handled. Using an x-post-like approach is just one idea.

I would like the ability for people to mod communities outside their instance.
- This is already possible.
- Not tried it, does it not work?
  
  Not yet, I think.
- Why wouldn't they just make an account there?
  This is like asking to redecorate your neighbor's living room
  
  I'd like to be able to ask my neighbours to help me move furniture in my living room.
  I don't mean community creation, just mod assistance. It's easier if we don't have to keep logging into different accounts is all.

Being able to block entire instances from your feed, without defederating.
- You can, since a couple versions ago.
  
  Either my instance updated recently, or I didn't notice it at the bottom of the block page. So useful thank you!!! No more lemmynsfw spam!

I want a 'disable inbox replies' equivalent

Better default UI and general refinement
Some system to make sure communities are on sync.
- theyre working on a new lemmy "lepton" ui, so a better default ui is in the works, in the meantime, you may like the photon ui
  
  I already use alexandrite and boost.
  But some newies may not stay b/c UI.

Multi~~reddits~~communities

Sometimes when I've found new communities on non local instances I'm unable to subscribe directly and I get a screen where it asks me what instance I'm subscribing from and when I click the only suggestion "lemmy.world" it doesn't recognize it as valid. I know you can subscribe to these communities in distant instances by using the local search bar with an exclamation point in front of it but it's a convoluted process and could be streamlined.
- Yeah the whole searching for other instances is painful 😣
  
  Another thing I just ran into, if I'm linked to the on-instance version of a thread on an instance other than my home, it says I need to log in or register to comment. How do I switch to the version of that same post as seen from my home instance? I wouldn't need to register a separate account because I see a lot of off-instance posts on my home feed. Perplexing.

Speed, a lot. Loading the profile for some reason takes forever for me, this "user not authenticated"
- That may be an issue with your instance. I can load your profile just fine, and mine loads fine too. But when I’m on a smaller instance (with less server computing) loading things takes noticeably longer. Simply because smaller instances have less computing to go around, so requests get queued and your client can time out if it stays in the queue too long.

Some kind of a chatroom integrated into the forum ?(might be a bad idea don't sue me . ) for stupid fun and close connections like it could be really barebones with only basic functionality i just think it could be fun.
- Feel like it'd make more sense to just have an official connected ~~Discord~~ Matrix server or similar chatroom endorsed by the instance.
  
  *Matrix
  
  Don't say the D word to me

On the mobile website when I tap the link into a post, read it and then hit the back button, I often end up on the page before the one I clicked into the link from, so like, I have to scroll to the bottom of the page and hit next and scroll down again to see the same link I originally clicked. Sometimes when this happens the "subscribed/local/all" and "new/hot/controversial" dialogs are reset as well and I've lost my spot in the feed entirely.
This doesn't emulate the presumed intended functionality of reddit feeds where if you hit back you are at the exact spot in the feed where you clicked the original link.

It would be nice if I was not logged out every few hours when browsing on iOS (safari). It’s annoying and I often just read threads logged out, then get sad when I can’t upvote without scrolling to the top to log in again.
- Happens with Firefox on Linux too. Very annoying.

The steam engine.
Brainstorm phase, go:
- What if instead of boiling steam we utilise the combustion of some sort of liquid coal to move the pistons?
  
  Excellent. Now let’s compile all these ideas and pick the best one to move forward on.

Make an easy way to open new boards so i can finally make my loftcraftian horror board.

Is there a way to watch old threads? I want to tag an empty discussion, get notifications when it becomes active (maybe digest mode to avoid spam)
I have FOMO on good content that isn't active yet.
Is this already a thing? FYI using sync app most of the time.
- I just use another app that doesn't hide read posts - it's a shitty workaround and really only functions for my local communities with little turnover, though
- I just save them (I use Voyager) and look back later at my saved posts (or comments).

Less jeanposting

Accountability and transparency in moderation. You aren't even made aware when you're banned from a place, you have to go out of your way to see and even then you have zero recourse in changing the decision if it was made in error. It's even worse when you get banned from your instance because it's just suddenly you can't log in and you don't even know why. You can't even transfer to a new instance. Pretty shit for something that can be done on the whim of a single person.
Somewhat related, as Lemmy continues to balkanize between pro-fascist instances (such as lemmy world, sh.ithole, and beehaw) and those explicitly against it (lemmy ml, lemmygrad, hexbear) the only way for users to opt out of interacting with users from those instances is to get yourself banned from the instance itself. I don't mince words and have a zero-tolerance policy for injustice so it's not hard for a person like me to catch those bans, but that's hardly ideal for the federation as a whole to have to rely on something they can't control in order to have a tolerable experience not constantly marred by some of the shittiest harassing assholes the federation has to offer.
EDIT: Maybe outright comment blocking on instances is a bit much, but absolutely auto-hide should be a thing.
- pro-fascist instances (such as […] beehaw)
  What.
  Oh wait, you're the nutball who starts calling people rapists and nazi pedophiles when you don't like them, aren't you? I saw you throw a spectacular hissy fit on some meme post.

Search. I want to search the entire Lemmy, not just 'my' instance.
Failing that: have Lemmy content appear in search engines.

A new Heathcliff community setup, to house all Heathcliff or Heathcliff adjacent content.
I would be so happy ; -)

For a technology which was born because of petty censorship on Reddit, the main Lemmy instance sure does do a lot of petty censorship.

I wonder if down votes should be lightly nerfed. The idea would be to make it easier for people to post mildly unpopular opinions in hopes of furthering discussions and weakening brigading. I imagine there are a lot of people who comment once, get downvoted and then either never comment again, or only comment in ways that are safe and appeal to the community’s biases and sense of humor.
Something like requiring 10 downvotes to drop from 1 to 0.
Oh, it would also discourage spite downvoting since it would be hard for any one user to push a persons comment to 0.
- Or since scores aren’t really even tracked across all of your posts and comments, we could just care a little less about how people are voting on our posts. If one isn’t well received it’s really not the end of the world.

Remove the ability to post images

I need avatar builder like Reddit's avatar builder

Developers who actually give a shit about what the users want and need.

161 comments