I’d like to invite you all to share your thoughts and ideas about Lemmy. This feedback thread is a great place to do that, as it allows for easier discussions than Github thanks to the tree-like comment structure. This is also where the community is at.
Here’s how you can participate:
- Post one top-level comment per complaint or suggestion about Lemmy.
- Reply to comments with your own ideas or links to Github issues related to the complaints.
- Be specific and constructive. Avoid vague wishes and focus on specific issues that can be fixed.
- This thread is a chance for us to not only identify the biggest pain points but also work together to find the best solutions.
By creating this periodic post, we can:
- Track progress on issues raised in previous threads.
- See how many issues have been resolved over time.
- Gauge whether the developers are responsive to user feedback.
Your input may be valuable in helping prioritize development efforts and ensuring that Lemmy continues to meet the needs of its community. Let’s work together to make Lemmy even better!
The issue with Lemmy’s “all feed” is that the largest or most popular instances tend to dominate what appears there, which undercuts the ability of users on niche or smaller instances to discover content truly relevant to their specific interests. This make different instances feel less distinct and reduces the value of joining a niche instance. This lack of meaningful, diverse niche content makes federation a moot point—if every instance is just a clone of the same meme and political noise, users gain nothing distinct from joining a smaller or niche instance, turning Lemmy into a less convenient, more fractured Reddit without the depth or polish users expect.
I use subscribed feeds, sorted by “scaled”. It pushes stuff from smaller communities I’m interested in up higher. Scaled doesn’t work that well on All though. It does mean I need to subscribe to things first, but I generally just subscribe to everything I’m interested in. I also browse All sorted by Top 6h regularly, to see what else is happening. Pretty good combo.
If you want to see smaller communities, sort by “Scaled”
If you REALLY want to browse All, try the “New Comments” sort, it’s like old forums
But I rarely look at All, mostly just Subscribed or Local
PieFed’s categories of communities / Topic areas does this. When I used Lemmy I never found anything remotely close to that, but perhaps the best was to (1) visit each and every community that you want to check up on individually, and/or (2) use New rather than Hot or Top… and then be prepared to block hundreds of communities that you never want to see content from, like sports or individual locations (cities, towns, stateships, regions, countries, etc.).
PieFed also combines all comments across all cross-posts, reversing the fragmentation effect from having too many communities split across many instances.
You all on Lemmy need to catch up!:-P
+100
The default “hot” sorting algorithm needs to prioritize smaller communities. Yes, I know we have new comments and scaled, but a classic UX principle is most users use the defaults.
Piefed has multicommunities https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list
I think you might benefit from trying the “local” feed, which is just your home instance :)
It could perhaps be better communicated though, but I’m not sure what framing or label might make it more clear what local means for less technical folks
It might just be something people need to learn because the fediverse is a different thing than traditional social platforms. But I don’t think that possibility should stop us from improving clarity if we can think of a good way to do so :)
Try All + scaled it order active posts and scales it so its not dominated by large communties… Also yeah its expected large communities will dominate an all inclusive feed. They product the most content and have the most users.
No, instead scaled sort makes the feed dominated by single users posting the same thing to 5 similar communities. Or a community’s single moderator posting 5 or 12 things at once to a community with no users
I find it far less helpful when browsing all.
Scaled is AMAZING for the Subscribed view, and this is my primary way of browsing Lemmy. But yea it’s pretty terrible for All
Allowing a user-configurable option to sort posts based solely on the current instance would address this by making the content feed more localized and personalized, helping each instance maintain its unique character and fostering community discovery without being overshadowed by larger instances.
That’s exactly what the Local feed is for.
If you don’t want All, don’t use All. Because All will give you All, not just Local. If you want Local, use Local.
For me, the issue is the lack of an ability to view the local of a different instance.
I’m on Lemmy.World. You’re on Communick.News.
If I want to view the local on Communick.News, I can’t. I have to create an account there. And if I want to view the local on Lemmy.World I need to log out of your instance, and log in over here.
Now here’s the bigger issue. Lets say I can click a button, and now a home instance, and all its communities could be saved to a special drop down tab that replaces the local. Your instance is always the default, but the rest are alphabetically listed.
So now that solves that, but we run into the next issue.
What makes Communick.News different from Lemmy.World?
See, if I had a Lemmy.Nintendo instance, it could have 50 different communities of different Nintendo stuff.
Then you could have Lemmy.Linux and have all the linux communities.
And sure, it’s decentralized so maybe Linux.paradise also exists and has some of the same communities.
The idea isn’t to centralize the instances. The idea is to theme them.
Reddit did this with multi-reddits. PieFed does this with categories of communities, Topic areas that are user customizable and shareable. Lemmy does not do this readily, although Blaze managed it… by making 50 different accounts, one per instance.
I don’t think I understand. You mean choose a local view of a different server? That would require every instance to duplicate everything on every other instance. Not possible.
It’s a paid instance. I pay a subscription fee to ensure it won’t die do to lack of resources.
What benefit would themed instances have. You can’t follow an instance…
Oh! That’s what your trying to do! You want to be able to see some logical grouping of related communities, and follow that! Now I get it.
Yah. That’s not the way to do that. The “MultiReddit” concept is what you want for that. A shareable list of related communities. That’ll work regardless of what instance they are hosted on. Multi-communities are on the pre v1.0 list already
you don’t actually need to logout/login, you can view them anonymously
even if you wanted to login to a different instance, you don’t need to logout of the previous one
although you’ll have to copy paste the post links to your own instance’s search bar in order to vote/comment
Sorting by Scaled, which by design puts emphasis on posts from smaller/less active communities, helps s lot.
I know it’s been said already and it’s not a perfect solution but for now it’s an under appreciated first step.
In my opinion scaled is pretty unusable as it just “balances” out the feed with obscure hentai and conspiracy posts with zero comments
I hear you, but this is a problem that I’ve solved by browsing the splash as Posts/All/New. It helps to catch rando posts that I wouldn’t normally stumble across.