Let’s compose a list of the all shortcomings so that we can address them and eventually hit 100k mau.
Finding instances for sure. Just learned in this thread that sorting by ‘all’ doesn’t show me every instance
Here are some great instance discovery resources:
Yes thank you, I’m aware of those. :) I meant via your own instance. I’m registered on a very small instance, and being able to discover other instances from your own would make it much more usable.
…Unless that is already possible. Lemmy isn’t that intuitive, at least for me
Hello,
Any reason you chose an instance this small? There are only 53 monthly active users. Lemmy.zip or lemm.ee would probably work better for you
Here are some great instance discovery resources:
Wait it doesn’t?! What does it do then?
When you block someone, all the subsequent comments made to that person’s comment are also unable to be viewed.
The default web interface is very poorly designed and looks uninviting. Sure, there are great alternative interfaces but people will be turned off before they could check them out. Also, it’s usually the first thing you see when someone’s sharing a link.
There not being an official app is also something that will confuse non-tech users.
Wait what? I love the look currently
Indeed an official app would ease the user on-boarding.
I had to read through some articles first to get the concept of the fediverse first and the look out for my home instance. That’s way too techy
We need a guide to send perspective users to signup through Lemm.ee and voyager to onboard them.
Original content could entice them to more willingly join Lemmy.
I thought Jerboa was the official app.
The default web interface is very poorly designed and looks uninviting.
Disagree. I find it rather clean and functional, even on mobile. Maybe because I liked old reddit. Maybe younger people are used to Instagram-like feeds so they don’t like the compact forum style.
The default web interface is very poorly designed and looks uninviting.
A redesign is on the way. It will use Leptos with DaisyUI.
There not being an official app is also something that will confuse non-tech users.
Jerboa is official.
Is Jerboa official? I used it at the start but it seemed to just stop getting developed. Myself and plenty of others have since moved on to other 3rd party apps. I’m using Voyager now.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/jerboa?tab=readme-ov-file#support--donate
“Jerboa is made by Lemmy’s developers”
Not enough people around to discuss some more niche topics and hobbies.
Specific video game subs are what I miss the most. I used to be very active in r/stalker and r/teslore, r/trueSTL. There is nothing like that here that sees more than one post per month, and I’m not sure that I have the energy to commit to reviving it myself.
Same, same. I miss hobby electronics projects. And some of the communities about AI topics (and more detailed descussion than just the hype) really lost momentum.
Have you tried being more in to US Politics, Linux and Privacy? I’ve found several very vibrant communities for those here.
Yeah, I think the main issue with that is both people watching the All feed and then complaining they get to see all the posts about all topics. And also people asking their Linux questions on c/asklemmy and other general purpose communities. I’ve given up on the US politics, though. That’s something we currently all have to go through. Remedy might be a keyword filter or turning off internet and TV for the coming weeks.
I keep hearing this. And I get it. But I think as a community our interests are so niche that we also miss out on more mainstream content I would like to see. For example there’s some prime time network TV shows I watch, there’s comms for them with subscribers but they are not active.
Sure. This wasn’t meant to take away from anything else. I think at least theoretically, both can go along. It’s just that it’s more obvious with the niche things. But probably applies to all of the topics. And there is a demand to discuss all kinds of things and I think we have the potential to let the user decide what they’re interested in… Whether that’s popular/mainstream or not. It just takes people to talk to to be present… somehow.
Oh I am absolutely not saying you are wrong. I completely agree with you. I’m just saying while there is a lack of niche content there is also a lack of mainstream content. Which might sound contradictory, but I think both can be true at the same time.
For example there’s some prime time network TV shows I watch, there’s comms for them with subscribers but they are not active.
Feel free to open threads on [email protected], we are the most active TV shows community
It’s too fractured, posts in one community on one instance have separate comments and interaction to the same post in the same community on another instance, even if you use crossposts properly, and it clutters up your feed with multiple of the same post
What the hell I didn’t even know this existed. I just chose all posts and thought I was seeing the aggregate content from every instance. Also, Seeing the usernames (with different instances on it), it made me believe everyone’s interactions are saved and visible.
Posts within the same community are synced and you can see communities from different instances. The point is that news@instance1 and news@instance2 are different communities even though the names are similar.
The counter argument is that reddit has the same problem even without federation. /r/games, /r/gaming and /r/gamers are three different subreddits with very similar names and you have no way of knowing which one is the “main” gaming community unless you check each of them. With time, this will probably sort itself out with lemmy as well. It just takes time for one of the similar communities to become the de facto standard.
Reddit has the same issue. People will post an article in like 6, somewhat related subreddits and the feed would be quite repetitive.
This is a big one. Its probably doomed to imperfection and hold out Mods who don’t want to do it but I think some kind of Community Sync option would be huge.
One problem is that the API call that returns the feed doesn’t provide crosspost information (unless that’s changed in 0.19.4+ since i’m still developing against 0.19.3).
Crossposts in the feed have to be done client side, and you can only “roll up” ones that have the same URL (Tesseract can optionally roll up on identical titles if there’s no URL). However, that’s limited to just the ones that come through in the same fetch (unless you store all posts locally, which is something I’m considering in the future for offline support; most apps don’t).
The API call that populates the
/postpage does provide that crosspost data, and I’ve thought about making an option to combine the comments from each into one “megapost”. But there are a few problems with that:-
Officially, crossposts are only compared against the URL. The crossposts may have different titles, and one or both may have different text in the post bodies. Which do you display?
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Culture clashes. Let’s say there’s an article posted called “Ford Releases Their New Monstrosity 5000”. It gets posted to
c/carsandc/fuckcarsby different people with different intentions.
The tone of the comments would be wildly different since the two communities are basically ideologically opposites. The replies to comments that came in from
c/fuckcarswould be responding to car enthusiasts fromc/carsand vice-versa. It would basically be a form of soft brigading.- It would be confusing for moderators to have multiple communities’ comments in the same post. What flies in one may violate a rule in another. Mods would only be able to take action against those in their community and not all.
I’ve wanted to do a feature like that for a while now, but every time I’ve tried to plan it out, it always seems like it would just make things worse. Even with indicators as to which community the comment came from, it’s still not ideal.
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…is it weird that I actually like this part of it? It feels like it allows there to be different “flavors” of communities, and I can decide which flavor I like and which one I don’t.
I can see how it would get frustrating as a poster trying to figure out which community will get the most reach.
I don’t think it’s weird. Right now it probably isn’t great cause the pool of commenters is already small, and this dilutes it further, but I think in a world where we had plenty of people in all those communities it would be fine.
It does suck on the posting aide, though, and it also seems like there might be some use to a tool/feature that merges them somehow so you’re viewing it all together and respond to whoever you like in one place.
When they post asking for help with Windows and get an entire thread of answers from obnoxious elitist wankers who couldn’t even decide on a distro between them
Gee maybe they should try using Windows tech support then
If a post is deleted for any reason it nukes everything, even the comments.
I can’t go back and view any comments that I was replying to or that I had saved, I can only see my own comment.
- The syntax of linking to users, posts, communities etc. is hard to keep a mental grip on. I know they couldn’t exactly copy reddit’s u/ for users and r/ for subreddits, but ! for communities and @ for users isn’t as schematic. I think it’s why you see it used less than on Reddit. And if you start to type a username, and an autocomplete window pops up, it inserts that format in brackets followed by a URL in parenthesis. To the right of the text box I’m typing in, I see, and I’ll approximate this as best I can:
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world
Neither has the exclamation point reminding you how to use that feature. My bipolar ex girlfriend had a more consistent UI than that.
- Linking to posts and comments is just pure moon logic. Follow me here:
This Post is stored on lemmy.world, right? Where is the comment I’m currently writing stored? on lemmy.world, or sh.itjust.works?
@[email protected] commented on this post, I’m going to use it as an example. There are two buttons next to their username. Both have the hover over tooltip “link”.
The chain looking one gives me this URL: https://sh.itjust.works/post/27359355/14761082
The…fedigon? What’s the name of the 5-pointed rainbow fediverse icon? looking one gives me this URL: https://midwest.social/comment/13230476
If I wanted to refer to kibiz0r’s comment in some other thread somewhere else, which of those links should I use? I figure in most cases I’m addressing an audience of the entire fediverse not just my fellow sh.itheads, so why would I ever use the first link? What does someone from lemm.ee see when they click on either of those links? Do they get to see it through their own account on their instance, or do they get linked directly to another instance? This really breaks the idea of “one account, whole fediverse.”
Can’t filter out non-English communities. On any given day, I could scroll through my feed and a third of them would be languages I can’t read. I wish I could, but I can’t.
I have to block the subcommunities one by one, and then block them again and again for every other instance that hosts that sublemmy
You can set your languages in the settings. As the warning say, make sure to keep “Undetermined” check along English
If you complain about a technical thing, you’ll end up having to justify every square inch of your existence in order to prove your complaint isn’t just user error.
Two examples from yesterday:
Many instances have domain names that look invalid and/or like scam sites to non-techies. Dot world? Dot social? Dot [obscure country TLD]? There’s also no guarantees that the domain will indicate that it’s a Lemmy site. Both of these become problematic with sharing, as the default (? been a while since I’ve used the web interface) share function links to the poster’s instance and not the community instance. A year and a half ago, the shared links section in my messenger was mostly a Reddit flood. Today, it looks like someone spilled alphabet soup.
Just today I was about to share a link and the URL was like “shit just works” and I was like damn, fuck that, I can’t share this shit. Not even joking
Okay but like why not? I actually don’t get everyone’s issue with shitjustworks. It used to be my main instance
Because my parents don’t like cursing lol
You can use the link icon to get the link from your own instance
When you block someone, you can still see that they replied to you. I don’t want to know of their existence period, that’s why I’m blocking them and they shouldn’t have a chance to respond to me period. It’s not blocking if they can reply to me and I still see a notification that they did.
It’s my own observation, but a lot of people on Lemmy are smug assholes, including many mods.
How did someone describe it? Like 14y/o 4chan users with the cynicism of a 45y/o?
That feels shockingly accurate
Hey wait a minute I resemble this strawman
Yeah well that’s just, like, your opinion man.
Shockingly familiar to early days Reddit. There was a sweet spot before Reddit got as big as it is today. I can’t tell you when it was but it was there somewhere.
That it’s not well known.
As a non-US user myself, beside the lack of participation on Lemmy, I think the kind of replies and the instant escalation to this comment, in this very thread is a great example of why Lemmy can suck, hard.
The world, exactly like the Internet, does not end at the US borders.
And yep, even though many US citizens seem to be on the verge of slicing each other throats, it doesn’t mean the rest of the world should behave the same. Lemmy users should still be able to discuss freely even between people of varying opinions, or even of completely opposite opinions.
This is comedy gold 🤣. Things get political so fast on here
As a US user, with a bit of an organization compulsion, I do wish it was a little more structured.
The problem is not that community x is us-centric, but that it’s not called x.us
It’s funny, cuz i remember tons of responses like that when i used Reddit, too. But the onslaught was often worse cuz the larger user base had more power to bombard you with insults about how wrong you are, and give you 49 downvotes in 10 minutes just cuz you give some criticisms about a popular game you didn’t happen to enjoy and forgot to add reluctant praise to (“i recognize it’s a great game and well made, but its just not for me sad face.”)
I think this is just a bad part of the internet, in general. Similar things would even happen in AOL chatrooms if someone voiced a disliked opinion, I remember Diamond chat would get crazy
To be fair it kinda is a bad part of even real world communities. Try going to a biker bar, animecon or any other community and saying “Gosh darn I don’t like ____”. Best case people would look at you funny and leave, worst - you getting a knuckle sandwich
