In this post I will list the known issues or possible improvements for Lemmy.world.
Please comment with any issue or area for improvement you see and I will add it here.
Remember: this instance was only started June 1st so a lot of troubleshooting and tweaking to be done.
Issues can be:
Local (lemmy.world) (also performance issues)
Lemmy software issues
Other software related (apps/Fediverse platforms etc)
Remote server related
(User error? ...)
Known issues
Websockets issues
There are some issues with the Websockets implementation used in Lemmy, which handles the streaming. Websockets will be removed in version 0.18 so let's hope these issues will be all gone then!
Top posts page gets a stream of new posts ? Websockets issue
You're suddenly in another post than you were before > Websockets issue
Your profile will briefly display another name/avatar in the top right corner
Spinning wheel issues
Error handling is not one of Lemmy's strongpoints. Sometimes something goes wrong, but instead of getting an error, the button will have a 'spinning wheel' that lasts until eternity.
These are some of the known cases:
You want to create an account but the username is already taken
You want to create an account but the username is too long (>20 characters)
You want to create an account but the password is too long
You want to create a community but the name is already taken
You want to create a community but the name is not in all lowercase letters
You want to create a post over 2000 characters
You want to post something in a language that isn't allowed in the community
Other issues
Federation not always working; Apparently not everything gets synced all the time. This needs troubleshooting.
“404: FetchError: invalid json response body at http://lemmy:8536/api/v3/site” This sometimes happens when the Lemmy app container is very busy. Needs troubleshooting
Enhancement requests
Can themes be added? > To be checked if this can be done without changing code.
On opening a new tab or window with a lemmy instance, I frequently find that I am not intially logged in. I am logged in, and refreshing the page a few times affirms this. It does not necessarily require a cacheless refresh (ctrl+f5). It also occurs regardless of what lemmy instance I'm browsing.
This started immediately after the hackening event of the other day. I'll play with what's in site storage in firefox later on and see what happens.
Edit: Ok something very odd just happened. I did the refresh thing and it briefly showed me logged in as @andybug@lemmy.world, for reasons unknown. It didn't stay logged in as (s)he, but very briefly flashed it as such.
Edit2: I deleted cache, webtoken, and other detritus in firefox, and refreshed the page to login again. I logged in, and the site served me the logged-out homepage until I refreshed again. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Edit3: I was logged out completely this morning. No explanation as to why as yet, I'll test tomorrow and see what browser storage looks like
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
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)
This seems like a really big problem to me. I tried searching lemmy for it, but have not found anything conclusive.
I found a post or two claiming that the issue is that the API is implemented using websockets only, so it’s not as simple as just turning it off. I really hope that is not the case, since I currently can’t read anything on the frontpage that takes more than a few seconds!
I have an issue to share and it's not major, but some of the links are wrong depending on the UI.
For instance, in the default UI, the link for your Privacy Policy page is This, but it should be This Instead (Note the trailing hyphen on the bad/dead link).
Of course, that's not a major concern and it is very minor, but misplaced legal docs could be problematic long-term.
I fixed that link, but actually lemmy.world/legal should redirect to legal.lemmy.world, which it apparently doesn't always do.
So we'll look into that as well.
Creating a new community, and the form is completely filled out, but when I press "create" it circles back to the top of the form. Also what is the difference between Name and Display Name. Name is what it keeps highlighting.
I'm experiencing a login issue related to Microsoft Edge on Mac OS.
Upon entering login credentials, the purple LOGGED IN popup box appears in lower left, but I am still not logged in. Upper right still shows SIGN IN. If I try to do anything, it redirects me to login page, credentials are entered, returned to home page again, but not logged in. Repeat ad infinitum.
Chrome and Safari work fine.
Browser: Microsoft Edge.Version 115.0.1901.183 (Official build) (x86_64)
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
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 :)
It occurs specifically when I navigate to a community page, without visiting the homepage first. If I navigate specifically to, for example, lemmy.world/c/lemmyworld, I'll be logged out. However, if I visit lemmy.world and then visit lemmy.world/c/lemmyworld, I'll be logged in.
I wonder if this is a bug with SameSite in the JWT? Reddit's token, for example, has a value of None, where Lemmy's has a value of Strict. I've changed that to None for the moment, we'll see if that changes anything
Specifically, I moderate /c/worldbuilding@lemmy.ml 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
I see a couple other comments about sign up issues and I’m having the same. Don’t see anything in my spam folder, though. Both submit buttons on the sign up/login pages just spin endlessly the last couple days. Someone said they managed to fix it by using "forgot password" on the login page but clicking that button does nothing. name’s same here as on midwest.social.
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.
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
Did the whole system just go down for a few minutes? I kept getting an API error and it kept switching to HTTP (not HTTPS) ... Seems a bit snappier though now that its back up
Is there a server status web page for future reference?
Post 0.18 update on desktop, the domain of external links is no longer visible (unless you hover over the link)
I miss this, as it goes to contextualising and trust issues - knowing whether a link goes to apnews, dailywire or theonion is a big deal, let alone the risk of malware/etc.
Some issues I've seen, mostly related to interactions with mastodon. I generally use Mastodon more so I've been playing with it.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
I wish the community page would let me sort the rows by Subscribers.
Hey /u/Mac if you know more can you expand? I understand it's asking me to pick a language, I just don't understand the warning. If i'm posting in english, it seems I should pick "english", but the warning makes it sound like i'll be missing out if I do that. What would I miss out on? What does it mean to "not see most content"? Why even have an option then? It's just super unclear what happens.
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 ?
Yeah I’m having lots of issues upvoting as well, I seem to be able to comment and post fine if I just wait a minute or so but upvoting doesn’t seem to work
If I'm in a community (particularly lemmy.world) and I'm inside of a post, there's no easy way to get back to the community. the top level link brings me to the instance homepage, instead of the community. So far the only way I see to do it is to click the tiny link inside of the post that brings me to the community the post was from. Additionally, I don't see an easy way to "know" what community I'm in when I'm inside of the post other than the same thing.
Seems like communities should still show the banner even when in the post, even if it's a comrpessed banner compared to the post list banner.
Yes clicked on the link took me to lemmy.world but just says verify email in the middle of the page
so not 100% positive it worked? name is otherpocket on this instance.
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.
Anyone else having issues with login on mobile devices? I can't login at all, but I can normally enter on desktop. Tried in Brave and in Chrome, it doesn't work–after pressing button it keeps loading forever.
EDIT: turns out I kept entering the wrong password entire time. 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
Certain communities seem to be inaccessible from Lemmy.world and vice versa. For instance, if I try to access /c/boston in Lemmy.ml via lemmy.world/c/boston@lemmy.ml, I get a "404: couldnt_find_community" error. Similarly, trying to access /c/boston in Lemmy.world from either Kbin.social (via kbin.social/m/boston@lemmy.world) or Lemmy.ml (via lemmy.ml/c/boston@lemmy.world) both give 404 errors.
Yeah possibly! I think the second issue I mentioned is still occurring, though. Namely, lemmy.ml/c/boston@lemmy.world returns a 404 error (and also for Kbin.social).
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?
The content, ~5k words, 23k characters with spaces. I was able to make a short post but copying/pasting over the long ones seems to not go through. I shortened it until it posted, and the limit is somewhere between 2k words and 1371 words, the 1371 word one being able to be posted.
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.
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!
Hehe, that’s my problem. I’m on iOS and the best alternative doesn’t allow sorting by Hot. Unfortunately for me that’s how I like to use the platform generally.
So, I've created !childfree as a local community, seemingly normal. Only, it doesn't seem to be accessible to anyone locally.
Meaning, https://lemmy.world/c/childfree gives me a 404. Instead, I have to open it as https://lemmy.world/c/childfree@lemmy.world - initially I thought maybe I had made an error creating the community and added the instance, but trying to replicate it shows that @ is not a permitted character, so the problem must have come from elsewhere.
Even if I enter the community locally, and click on the !childfree just below the name of the community, it gives me a local 404 (see below).
Any idea what's going on here, and how to resolve the problem? Since we are redirecting users from our sub here, it's creating quite some headaches... And apparently users trying to subscribe from other instances also don't see any posts for up to 48h (tried that myself).
Edit: Apparently I cannot access the community via feddit.de. The other one works fine though - I do have accounts on either instance.
I think OP comment and my issue are related. What can we do to help investigate this? I was planning on moving over a community from reddit and this is unfortunately blocking it. If I can help in any way to figure this out and resolve it, I'd be more than happy to do so <3
Could you try it again now? I did a search for the community on here and afterward was able to open it via your link, but I want to confirm it's not just me.
Edit:
If it works for you now, I think it was related to the community not being searched/seen by the instance just yet despite us being linked to mander.xyz.
(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.
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.