This, by a mile.
Especially considering the nature of lemmy means you end up with a lot of duplicate communities.
This is also my biggest missing feature.
I remember reading a Github issue about it and iirc it is a bit challenging to get it to work with federation.
I'm ok with that. I went back on reddit after hanging out here for a while. There's a lot more content of course, but the comment sections were largely trash. A lot of dumb jokes and circlejerks and way too many people to actually converse with anyone.
It also seemed to me that a growing number of comments in recent years there on product-relates posts (e.g., what's the best language learning app?) reeked of companies promoting their own products rather (e.g., someone's post history was selectively related to promoting some app after a period of inactivity). I haven't seen things like that here at all, which is nice.
I love lemmy, don't get me wrong, but I do miss the niche and specific game and music communities on there. Lemmy is mostly politics and memes at this point. All the more specific communities are very small.
And it would've been bearable, if the politics weren't pretty much the same as on Reddit. From what I see, it has almost exactly the same libleft bias Reddit userbase has, with an (understandable) addition of interest in Linux, self-hosting and FOSS culture.
my perception is that Reddit is more liberal while Lemmy is more leftist. it's like comparing reform with revolution. of course, our individual differences would depend on the subs/communities we've subscribed to on top of our inherent policial tendencies
definitely agree with your first sentence, a lot of people (i think maybe from the usa?) conflate libertarianism/liberalism with leftism.
That’s just kinda the reality of demographics. Generally less people on the right than on the left, and those on the right are usually older, so still on Facebook. This site still over indexes with people on the left but so did Reddit when it first started.
Videos. Viewing your up/downvotes. Profile posts.
Not a feature of Reddit, but I also miss RES features: user tagging, seeing my votes on a user next to their name, advanced post filtering, and more.
This. We could get rid of so many posts whining about political memes, and posts whining about the whining.
Just tag the meme as “political” and let us filter it or not.
More communities. Not a feature but I do miss the large diversity of communities on reddit
But the communities need to be not just me. I'm not going to start something super niche and be the only one to post to it.
No, I am not going back on Reddit. There are compromises you have to make in life. It's like saying you miss some good characteristics about an ex, but that does not mean the solution is to go back to them.
It is time consuming to create your own communities and as a college student I don't have that time unfortunately. Otherwise I would love to
Lengthy analytical comment debates in every trending thread. I'm not saying it's absent, of course, but there is a distinct lack of detailed high-level discourse.
To be fair, the same has plummeted on Reddit in recent years, but that's the major drawcard that Lemmy will take years itself to emulate.
Your experience may have been different than mine, but I found that I've had more thoughtful, lengthy discussion on Lemmy than in the final few months on Reddit.
Sure, the topics I viewed were more broad over there, but discussion on popular threads just get lost in 1000 comments and even trying to spark discussion with people in New got me fewer bites than here. That and the antagonstic form of debate were turnoffs for me (sadly, a bit of that did also migrate to Lemmy).
Users here actually sort of listen to each other. Non-bot OPs will often reply to you. People will understand what you're saying even if you have a typo, without having to dedicate the entire comment about it.
Yes there are plenty of trolls here too, but overall my experience has been more pleasant than my 6 years on Reddit. Feel free to tell me about your experience, I'm not here just to disagree with you.
All great points. I’ll, somewhat hypocritically, leave it there.
This time I’ll not be the change but your attempt to elicit same is not unnoticed.
Better moderation tools. A lot of these features are nice to have, but there is no way Lemmy can grow without better moderation tools.
Even with the tiny userbase, we're having problems with spam and rule breaking content. Add more users and it's going to be a mess.
Ya, I dunno why mod tools are not a priority... So many defederations could be avoided with better mod tools..
Wiki pages for communities. It’s a great way to collect useful information that would otherwise get lost in different posts
Album posts. I'd like to share related pics in one post. Not sure how to do this if it's already there.
Yeah but not all clients show them properly or make it obvious that there are multiple images and allow you to swipe through all of them.
Which is probably a client issue that could be fixed, but for now, that functionality might as well not exist for a large portion of the users.
I mainly use Liftoff and it looks like it should work, I put the code in, but I don't have luck with it. I was excited to try Boost again, but that has a very bare bones post screen, so I don't even try.
I sometimes just use a collage maker to put them into one image, but then they're small. In trying to build up a picture oriented community (!superbowl@lemmy.world) it stinks to not have more options to post media.
More granular moderation tools.
But in the last dev AMA they made it clear that wasn't a priority. Honestly it killed a large chunk of excitement I had about Lemmy. Without ways for mods to keep the communities free of shit heads the communities won't be sustainable and will stop growing.
Could you link the AMA?
Curious what they didn't want to work on. The current moderation tool setup is not going to work long term lol
Sure, here you go. Personally, I don't like his responses.
This is just extra special of not feeling great about lemmy into the future.
As someone frequently labeled as a shithead, I’m glad I’m in a community where I get to stay.
You can still be shitty in those communities too, but with better moderation tools other people who want a space without bigots and hatred can still maintain those. So we can have both, right now it's mainly the shitty people that are happy. Which is not good for building lasting communities.
The mod tools are pretty basic but the essential stuff is already there IMO. The only thing that I've been missing is a modmail or the ability to remove comment chains. And Lemmy is still small enough that I can do it all by hand.
There will probably be a new instance every day and they will therefore never be able to actually block "memes"
Sync supports filtering out communities containing certain words, and it works across instances. And you can block entire instances too btw. You can even block posts containing certain words btw, so if you're fed up of say seeing M**k everywhere, you can add a filter for that too.
I like the idea of individuals filtering their own content instead of moderators filtering it for them.
after you sign up to reddit, it will ask you to pick a few things you like from a tag cloud. it will then try and show you more of that.
I hated that. I used to burn reddit accounts after about 2 months snd every time that part sucked because the only options were like "fashion," "basketball," "Game of Thrones," and other big stuff. If it let me search for the specific subs I knew I wanted, it would be been fine. But no, it had me select random interests. Algotithm-generated content suggestions are the death of the true internet.
You can search for communities and subscribe to them. Then you can select "subscribed" instead of "local" or "all"
I think what theyre getting at is lemmy doesnt really have a good way to discover sublemmies. A lot of the subs ive found were through all when they just happened to pop up now and again rather than specifically searching for a particular topic. Thats not a very fast way to find new communities. Which you could argue reddit doesnt do a great job of it either but lemmy is in a position where it cant afford to be inefficient.
That's the same way I found subreddits on reddit, how do you search for anything other than subreddit names on Reddit?
I found a lot of the subs I visited through other subs. i.e subs that linked to each other. These communities did that because Reddit's search functionality and discoverability is notoriously terrible. But they got away with it because of the sheer numbers of users. I estimate that just before the digg exodus, reddit had about 30 to 40 million users and that number tripled by a year later. To put this into perspective, lemmy probably has about a milllion users currently. Maybe two if we are being generous. Theres not really enough users or history to have the word of mouth growth reddit did without a good means to introduce users to new communities. Especially given that several of them are duplicates. eg. technology
You have a point here. On r*ddit, people just link a sub that exists or not, no matter, by just writing r/randomsubname. Sometimes just for a joke, sometimes to share a niche sub or something.
On lemmy linking communities is much harder so you do it if you really want to. You have to know the name and the instance and at least for me, there is no auto complete.
I might be alone in this, but everyone always talks shit about recommendations or "the algorithm" on a lot of platforms. It's really important though. There's a difference in usability if you see what you like really quick. If you want to make sure ppl don't get it if they don't need it, make it a new tab.
I really think Lemmy is great and it's potential is even greater, but users and ease of use are the bottleneck rn, and that goes for every aspect of it.
I don't mind algorithm feeds as long as it's not the default view and as long as it's not mingled with the normal feed. Reddit is an example of the latter case. They mix "promoted" content as well as "you visited a subreddit once so we think you'll like this post" content along with posts from subreddits you subscribe to. I find that annoying.
So I wouldn't mind if Lemmy had an algorithm to recommend posts as long as it was in a "recommended posts" section. Then people who want it could click over to it and people who don't like that could just ignore it.
Lemmy of all platforms is able to work fine without an algorithm. There needs to be some better sorting options, though. 'Hot' prioritizes new posts way too much, so you don't even see posts that are 2 hours old.
Also some way of making posts from smaller communities show up higher since they'll never get as many upvotes as posts from popular communities.
I agree. I frequently see posts that are months old using "new". I don't think that means what they think it means.
Videos hosting or someway to more seamlessly share video content. The Reddit player sucked fat donkey dicks, but the idea of viewing video in a post instead of clicking out to some rando site is much preferred.
Honestly, I read shit like this and wonder why some people are so married to failure. It's like asking how to do something in Windows, and being told to switch to Linux.
Please just add an option to open everything in a new tab. "Well," I hear you say, "you can just use the middle mouse button." You're right, I can. But that doesn't switch to the new tab, so that's another click added to the process.
Because it's an anti-feature that goes against standards and accessibility. Hold control or middle mouse click if you want the content in a new tab.
This is why some software succeeds and others don’t. Middle mouse click or using two hands is not accessibility. Having an option to toggle this behaviour is
Right click> select option works too. You have plenty of options that will already work for you. Just because you don't like them doesn't make it not accessible.
At least it keeps me from using it on any other platform than phone. But usability shouldn’t be centre stage of a service, standards should.
I think the standard is that you can use the tools and options available to you to open in a new tab or window. If none of those are usable for you I'd have a hard time believing you can find the option you want buried in a settings menu.
That’s your theory - I don’t work like that when I choose from competing services. I do configure RES with no issue, and I still won’t open lemmy in a browser as it sucks compared to Reddit with RES.
Since Lemmy is just a small federated alternative to Reddit, not that many people are gonna know about it. As a consequence, not that many communities that were on Reddit are as big on Lemmy, if they even exist at all.
It's actually better because now I can cut down on social media usage and spend my time on actually productive things, like watching paint dry.
More users would be nice, but Rome reddit wasn't built in a day either, so I'm hopeful that we'll get there eventually.
As for actual features, I'm missing the ability to upload videos directly to the site, but I can totally understand why it isn't a feature as it would eat up a lot more resources than just text and pictures.
Yeah I wonder what would be a good design compromise in showing users videos while not actually hosting them on the website.