Ask Lemmy

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.

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 /post page 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:

1. 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?

2. Culture clashes. Let's say there's an article posted called "Ford Releases Their New Monstrosity 5000". It gets posted to c/cars and c/fuckcars by 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/fuckcars would be responding to car enthusiasts from c/cars and vice-versa. It would basically be a form of soft brigading.

3. 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.

…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.

this election is among the most important ones in the history of the country. if not the most. i am also looking forward to it just being fucking done with and having other things on the feed

I recall another thread a few weeks ago where someone suggested a no political discussion day, and everyone down-voted him and gave them angry responses. I recall one up-voted response saying "everything is political".

This place has become an echo chamber for cranky old Linux users and is really uninviting to anyone else.

One of the things I miss about Reddit is the diversity of opinions and viewpoints on the platform. (I didn't love the insane amount of reposts and bot traffic)

Nah, I have a different gripe:

When the reddit exodus happened, Lemmy was flooded with copycat communities for every popular subreddit. That's fine with me. But what's not fine is that very few of these communities use the same posting rules (if any at all) so they're homogenized. Like what is the difference between nostupidquestions and asklemmy?

I have another one that's not specific to Lemmy but absolutely applies: meme "communities" where it's all reposted content. I used community in quotes because these communities/subreddits/Instagram accounts are just....meme archives. You'll find the same shit in every single meme archive on the internet. It feels like it's less about sharing and more about having the biggest bucket.

if a "viewpoint" is based on lies coming from a convicted felon rapist traitor to the country, than anyone holding that viewpoint can actually go fuck themselves

edit: as a reminder, we're talking about people who cause and advocate for this

Agreed, basically if you are moderate, you have to block 2 or 3 major instances to escape from extremist content. That's very unwelcoming for new users.

I’m pretty sure Lemmy has a right wing bloc of instances.

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.

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.

I thought Jerboa was the official app.

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

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

Isn't it always that >95% of users are lurkers? I don't bother logging in most of the time, I just go to lemmy.world or something and sort by all

This one is my biggest challenge too… I wish there was, like, a “trial” instance that folks were automatically signed up for and then after 30 days they had to switch and find another instance.

Once you’re in the door it’s lovely, but that first barrier to entry scares people off.

They're not all permanent, Lemmy displays the duration in the mod log. I agree that there should be some kind of notification though.

Gosh the permanent bans being handed out like candy to someone being rude is often too much.