I’m curious to get everyone’s thoughts on opportunities to improve!
More comments, in general. Many posts have tons of upvotes but zero comments so it’s hard to engage in a conversation.
can’t speak for others, but i’m mostly the quiet/introverted/lurker type…
sometimes i just feel like i have nothing valuable to add to the conversation
i will make an active effort to engage more tho
This is a good start :) thanks for the comment/contribution
That’s fair. I wonder if anyone has looked into the vote to comment ratio compared to other social media platforms. I’m curious how Lemmy compares
I did a little informal comparison between my posts and the ones at r/Superbowl, and whole the ratio was at least decently better at the time, I still get disappointed if I don’t get a few comments on each post.
The likes are great and all, but to me, that just kinda feels like I’m just checking off boxes. It’s the most basic form of approval.
Comments though are what really let me know making the posts are worth my time. It lets me know I’m reaching you guys enough to make you say “hey this is cool.” And actual questions or you sharing something about a life experience, etc is worth way more than a hundred upvotes because it lets me know I’ve triggered good feelings in you from something I posted and it makes me want to post a hundred more things to do that again.
I always make sure to thank my commenters and let them know by replying, they are doing something as important as I am by posting. Without them completing the other side of the equation, it’s just me telling into the void, and it’s boring for me and makes posting a chore. But by you saying literally anything positive, I know I’m having an impact on your day, hopefully in a positive way, and that encourages me to post more, making a positive feedback cycle that will keep this a good place to come.
You are right, upvotes are useless internet points but comments stay for future people looking for info. This was why Reddit was useful, finding an answer to a problem in a 7 years old post.
Yeah I’ve started to contribute more with comments as well. Sometimes just saying the obvious is a nice way to get the community going!
Agreed! Even a small comment gets the momentum going
so it’s hard to engage in a conversation.
Have you tried asking a question related to the original post’s content?
Yes, I do it when I need it but I mean more in general, if I enter an empty post chances are that there’s nothing for me to say. The more comments the more probable is you have an opinion to discuss or something to add to.
More fun-type content.
I like Lemmy, but I feel constantly bombarded by depressing content and “comedy” poisoned by irony and sadness.
Yeah, I wish there was a “happy mode” on Lemmy for when I’m already feeling a bit of existential dread. I know it’s not really possible without doing expensive content scanning but I can dream.
Depressing content, and comments full of political extremism where even if you agree in principle, if you don’t take it to quite the extent the rest of them take it, they wanna crucify you.
Like…as much as my political opinions tend toward progressive, my time here has really gotten me to come around on why a lot of people elsewhere on the political spectrum can’t stand progressives.
I’ve never been someone who blocks people and I’ve never been into filtering posts on any site/platform. But there’s no shame in it here. It’s VERY intended for users to have that ability and not just use it when they’re being harassed. For a bit I was even considering using adblock filters to get block some keywords but that hasn’t been as much of a problem lately for me. But just a few communities and accounts are responsible for most of the doom and gloom.
Yeah this place is by far the most negative social media I’ve tried
I’d like all of the similar communities grouped so I can sub to one. It is annoying seeing the same content posted to multiple communities on different instances. It is also harder for new users to find.
I think we would have more active larger communities if they could all be grouped as one.
For example if we have gaming@domain1 , gaming@domain2 and gaming@domain3
I would prefer it was just gaming and all three synced the content and comments. If one node was to drop all of the content and comments would be there. There would be a larger more active community and less repetition. If a new gaming@domain4 joined it would be seeded with the existing content and sync any new content from that node.
I know it doesnt work like this but I think it would be nice if it did. I know if I go to a steamdeck subreddit I will find all the news related to that. Here I need to check the three or four that I’m subscribed to which is a pain point.
Yeah this is one of the things keeping me from using Lemmy as much. I am subscribed to multiple Steam Deck, Patient Gamer, and technology communities and they all have different levels of activity and I see a lot of duplicate posts.
I believe this would help a lot
I know that it’s a core design feature of Lemmy and the underlying federation, but it’s pretty annoying that multiple communities with the same name can exist on different instances while not necessarily following the same ruleset or even purpose.
The small user base gets even more fractured that way, a lot of posts get reposted to multiple instances as well.
So you either:
- subscribe to one or two communities and miss a lot of potentially interesting conversations
- subscribe to more communities and get flooded with reposts and potentially stuff you don’t want to see due to a different ruleset
You nailed my issue with the fundamental idea of lemmy. It’s like having a party at ten people’s houses with a tenth of the normal amount of guests.
Some sort of user-controllable merging of community views would honestly alleviate most of this:
Adding something like user-specific topics, e.g. allowing the user to consolidate all posts from instanceA.communityA and instanceB.communityA and even instanceA.communityB into a custom community view shouldn’t be all that difficult to implement (he stated naively, having never looked at the codebase).
A great addition would also be to allow the merging of posts, e.g. show all comments of all threads under one post where the post URL matches and/or the title matches.
This isn’t exact, since multiple communities can discuss the same topic from completely opposite viewpoints, but at least allowing the user to consolidate stuff and control it would be huge.
On a user level I agree it’s a very good feature (if configurable, not just an automatic grouping of similarly named communities). For merging post, not sure I want that, perhaps a bit too smart… Now if many users want this why not (as long as there is a setting to turn it off ;)).
Do you think that the ability to hide duplicate posts could solve this?
Somehow prevent multiple posts with the same content from showing up in my feed consecutively. Some people post to multiple communities (which is fine, if the content is relevant), but sometimes I see 3-4 identical posts by the same person in various communities, one after the other on my feed.
I’ve blocked some accounts who have done this excessively, but in many cases it’s valid.
Now that cross posting directly is getting more support it would be cool for Lemmy to have a setting where it marks ALL cross posts as read as soon as one of them is. That way they would be filtered out by the “show read posts” setting along with the original.
I would love to reduce cross posted dups too
Users.
Posts from ultra niche topics I’m interested in that inspire me to do things I would not otherwise. That is what I miss most.
I hope that the new “scaled” search helps solve this very issue
More friendliness.
Users. Sites like reddit and communities like Lemmy get their strengths (and weaknesses, but that’s ok) from the size and contributions of their populations. Lemmy doesn’t have enough yet.
I like to engage in nuanced topics more than I like posting or commenting on random memes. Not necessarily to argue but to learn.
But if you post a comment in a thread that opposes the hive mind - heck even if you suggest the issue might be more complicated - you will accumulate down votes which I presume risks your comment visibility in other threads at a later time.
I wish the voting system could somehow be altered so that there’s a useful/thoughtful indication separate from the “I agree/ I disagree” button.
Oh man… you’re basically speaking directly to why I made our small community (consider this a personal invite). As I said elsewhere, I find Lemmy actively hostile.
The number of indignant replies and comment-free downvotes we get inundated with continually is… disheartening.
People want content, but actively detract from any content that doesn’t explicitly cater to them. It’s hard to take.
Right on! Subscribed and happy to see the effort
Fixing that bug where if you do something like upvote someone while typing a comment, your comment gets deleted.
Stop making “Undetermined” the default language for posts and comments, so my feed stops getting spammed by foreign language posts that didn’t bother to correctly tag themselves.
Allow blocking entire instances (I think this might be in the latest update which my instance hasn’t yet migrated to?).
Beyond that, the only thing I really miss from reddit is being able to open the comment thread for a post and read literally hundreds of comments. Gets a bit underwhelming seeing so many front-page posts with 1 or 2 comments.
Lemmy needs more small communities.
Lemmy is the small community lmao
That’s not exactly what I meant. Aside from a decent Trekkie presence, I don’t think we’ve seen smaller Reddit communities leave for Lemmy.
Oh sorry, I knew what you meant. I was just being tongue in cheek haha. But you’re right, we don’t have any niche presence and that’s what made reddit what it was.
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As someone who started and is extremely active in a small community, I find Lemmy actively hostile to the point where I’m considering closing up after less than a month.
The number of indignant replies and comment-free downvotes we get inundated with continually is… disheartening.
People want content, but actively detract from any content that doesn’t cater to them. It’s hard to take.
Multi-reddit-like functionality.
Users being able to group communities together themselves might also be a potential solution to the many, many posts complaining about the fragmentation of identical communities across instances.
Indeed this would really be a game changer feature. However I don’t complain about community fragmentation, I think it’s great because the communities are not really identical but share the same topic, sometimes with different tone, moderation, …
Better timelines. Currently there’s a lot of content buried which makes it really hard to create consistent cultures.
As in better sorting options?
Yes the front page sucks no matter what sorting option you use and it’s not because the posted content is shitty its just sucks in the way it presents it.
To be honest, I still don’t really know the difference between ‘hot’ and ‘active’
Wish those had more accurate descriptors.
To change the default for comment sorting, YES PLEASE.
I am having to click “Top” for every single post. It’s become a reflex but seriously this is crazy. It feels like I must be doing something wrong but I have looked everywhere for the setting and there isn’t one. I’ve assumed this is just an oversight that will soon be fixed, but it never is.
I just don’t get it.
Are you using a specific lemmy app? I imagine that many apps have this
Using the app that is the vanilla website.
Less Linux 🫠
Look, I installed Linux on my back hair. 😁
