For me its having a single instance that indexes all the communites to which all other instances can then pull that information from so when I go searching for communities the I’ll have access to every single one with needing to post the entire URL in the search bar
Yeah. Joining communities from other instances is a hassle. Kinda puts me off sometimes.
Definitely a big problem. UX can make or break a service. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time though :)
Yeah my #1 issue is how hard it is to find communities to follow. I think it’s why so many communities are just started on lemmy.ml since it has the best chance to get users on there or Beehaw.
Really? I don’t get that. I go to the ‘communities’ button at the top, where they are sorted by population, so it’s easy to find some good ones right away. If I want to search something specific I type it in the search bar and there it is. Is it not that way for you? That seems easy to me
That’s because you joined the largest community. It’s much more cumbersome for smaller communities.
Indeed. The largest weak point for me.
I have to go to third party site where I can see a list of communities, find one, copy some url, go back to my instance and search then paste the url.
At this point I get nothing, or 404, or a nothing found error. Generally this is where it stalls, and i give up and come back half an hour later if I remember and try again.
This time the search may find the community, but has failed to do so several times. Still trying to subscribe to a pathfinder community which I started trying to do earlier this morning
Usually, I search for the URL, but it gives no results. However, in the backend my lemmy instance is downloading a bunch of posts from that instance, and when I look at my list of communities, it’s suddenly there. Awful user experience, but it works. I’m sure this will improve in the future.
That works easily when you want to join communities already on your instance. But if you want to search for other communities you need to go to https://browse.feddit.de/, search for them there, copy the url, then join. Also you cant sort that list by anything, you kinda need to know what you are looking for.
Its…a bit too complicated. I’m sure it will get better with time.
Being able to mark post as read, and have them be hidden from my feed. Or hide posts I have upvoted/downvoted.
Also it would be really nice to have the ability to group communities together from my view point. So instead of a single lemmy feed with all of my subscriptions mixed together I can have multiple feeds each based on say a single topic. Say I have a group called Gaming. and in that I have !gaming@lemmy.ml and !linux_gaming@lemmy.ml !gaming@beehaw.org etc… etc… I think this would also help the issue with having similar communities on multiple instances. For example We have !technology@lemmy.ml !technology@beehaw.org I could subscribe to both and just use a single group to view them both. Instead of having to view one at a time.
Edit,
Oh here is another one. It would be great if lemmy links were automatically converted to your local instance.
For example someone linked this https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/61827
Sure this works for everyone but it takes you out of your lemmy instance if your not using lemmy.blahaj.zone. I am a user of lemmy.ml, so from my prospective going to lemmy.blahaj.zone doesn’t give me any options to interact with that content. I would need to manually find that post from my instance that I am logged into. From my prospective that link should have been converted into lemmy.ml link and go here https://lemmy.ml/post/1160417 so I can seamlessly interact with it.
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Automatic discovery of communities from instances your community knows about.
That would be awesome and make for a good user experience.
I would love to have tags added that I could search at across instances. So looking up #animalpics might be all the communities that post pictures of animals
Then add to that the ability to follow that tag like you can on Mastadon and that would solve some of the “Super Community” asks.
I’m almost reluctant to post suggestions about what I’d like to see on Lemmy/kbin. It feels kind of entitled, you know? It’s early days and there are obviously lots more important things to get stable and established first. Not to mention the devs are doing this for free and about to come under a lot of pressure. As a dev myself, used to listening to users making subjective demands about the “right” direction to take an app, I fully sympathise :)
That said, my offerings for the suggestion pile would be:
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Discoverability - finding and joining communities isn’t intuitive at the moment. This seems to be a fediverse problem rather than a lemmy/kbin problem, as Mastodon has similar issues. It should be as simple as “search for a topic, hit subscribe”. Instead it involves copy pasting cryptic strings of text, editing them sometimes, then searching, and a bit of hoping. I think this will be the number one issue that impacts adoption.
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UX - more one for lemmy than kbin, but there are improvements that could be made to the UI to improve user experience. A general tidy up to improve visuals (things like alignment of community names without icons, for example), ordering of lists of communities, external links opening in the same tab (appreciate some prefer this, but it tends to lose your place in a feed).For kbin, easy access to your list of subscriptions would be great.
Honestly, most of the UX stuff is low priority compared to getting the apps stable and coping with scale. I hope they figure out those wider challenges though, because there’s definitely a lot of promise here.
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Fix the deletion of comments so that the content is removed rather than just flagged as deleted.
This is my number one wish as well. I’m well aware that people can archive or snapshot my comments/content, and the site can keep backup servers, and that we should assume that things we post online should be treated as if it were there forever, but no one can convince me that any of these situations is remotely comparable to not being able to delete my own public-facing content.
It’s also the number one concern I’ve heard from people on reddit who are considering migrating to Lemmy, but are undecided.
I really wish they’d fix this.
Software engineer here. Historically we started not hard-deleting anything because sometimes software does bad things and we never want to accidentally delete anything that could be important since then the only way to undo it is to restore the database from a backup. So it’s better/safer to literally not allow the application to ever delete anything from the database.
That being said, I could see an option in ActivityPub to delete comments, but with the distributed nature of Lemmy you would have to trust every server you federate with to listed to the protocol and delete the comments too since they are stored on the other servers as well.
Trust of federated servers isn’t the issue. We already trust federated servers to publish the text we wrote and not some alternative version the owner wanted us to say.
The problem is instance owners don’t even have the option to obey deletion requests. They want to help delete your content but they cannot.
The whole “what’s the point of building it if there’s a possibility one dude doesn’t obey the request” is whataboutism.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t be able to hard delete comments, I’m just explaining why the Lemmy developers might not have started with hard-deleting comments. I agree with you we should have the option and it should propagate regardless of any instance settings.
My point in mentioning other servers not deleting your comments is that ActivityPub is an open standard. Technically someone can write a Lemmy competitor that federates with your instance and does not implement the hard deletion of comments. It’s allowable under the protocol. That doesn’t mean the feature isn’t worth implementing, it just means there are caveats to “this comment disappears off the Internet forever” like we’d like.
I fully understand wanting to restore things from a backup, but I don’t grasp how giving us the option to hard delete our own posts and comments would interfere with that in any way. Safest? Perhaps. A reasonable tradeoff for such safety? Not in my opinion.
As for your latter point, maybe that’s one of the drawbacks to federation that does not get discussed enough. However, I’d think there’d be some sort of solution to put more control of our data into the hands of the users.
I’d love to see a poll option :)
By far my biggest thing is RES style keyboard shortcuts
The second for me is going to have to be automatic instance redirection
A small quality of life thing, but some way to mark notifications as ‘read’ automatically, either when i click through to view it in the thread or when i vote on it. Maybe I’ve missed a setting somewhere, but when someone replies and I go to read/interact, the notification number stays there until I manually go and click ‘read’
I have run into the same issue. Although I can’t figure out if that is working as intended or if the server is just overloaded and the read signal just never got processed correctly. As I have had some notifications go away seemly automatically but other notifications refuse to go away until I click read.
I feel like the request in the OP can be fixed by some kind of community digest that gets shared as instances federate with each other, and then on a recurring basis afterwards.
Basically Lemmy needs support for this: https://git.asonix.dog/asonix/relay
What does that do?
