What features would you like added to Lemmy itself?
Often, its asked what the fediverse or lemmy needs more of in terms of content, but are there any specific features or functionality you really feel are lacking?
Multi-communities.
So you can create a list of communities over various instances and show all posts in them as if they were one.
This is the big one I want too. I'd love to curate topic based feeds from multiple communities so that other people could subscribe to a single coffee feed instead of 5-8 communities that they had to find themselves. I think this would be particularly useful for new people joining Lemmy, it would save a lot of time if they could just sub to a couple of multi's and start getting content they're interested in rather than needing to build their sub list entirely from scratch.
Yeah. Or just personalized feeds that you could share. I'm sure some instances have a great list of communities that their subscribers follow, that isn't available on/Local. And going to /All isn't always a good time. If there was like a /All, but maybe with some extra filters, that users could just subscribe to, that would be awesome
I have this in Tesseract as "Community Groups" (works exactly like you described; browse the group as a custom feed), but I've neglected it for some time now. It works, but it's kind of slow and the sorting/mixing could use some improvement.
The sorting/mixing used to be better, but Lemmy 0.19.0 removed most of the ranking specs from the API response, so I can only sort on the basics like score, number of comments, and date. :(
Being able to actually migrate an account, not just settings and follows etc but your post and comment history etc. All data
Some way of linking to a post somewhere on Lemmy that will open up the post in your logged in instance of Lemmy.
Would upvote this suggestion more tan once, if I could.
there's https://lemmyverse.link, but a native way of doing so would be nice.
Ultimately, using a protocol handler instead of URLs would solve that (ie: like how mailto links works).
Photon does that, and so does Tesseract, but it only works if you're logged in since it relies on resolve object API call (which requires authentication)
Search the remote post URL in your search bar, it will open locally
I actually think some URI like fediverse:... might be better. You know, something like the mailto:coolguy@coolmail.com URI that works across all supported email websites or even apps.
Followong a user.
You can, at least, do that externally through RSS:
IIRC kbin/mbin have that, but I don't recall whether it applies to all posted material or just a user's microblog.
I never used it myself, as I really prefer the Reddit-style "community-oriented" structure to the Twitter-style "user-oriented" structure.
Show me a list of posts and comments I upvoted.
That works with Boost for Lemmy, so apparantly the data is already there in the backend (and at least one frontend).
The voyager app has that feature.
The API supports that, but not all UIs do yet.
It's on my "to do" list for my app.
Ninja edits. A grace period where you can edit your comment without it showing it was edited. This is usually for typos and formatting mistakes that you notice right after posting your comment. A minute will do.
If anything, I'd love a diff of each edit vs the ability to ninja edit
rather than allowing edits for invisible edits for X minutes, couldn't your client just delay actually sending it for X minutes allowing to cancel or edit freely until that point?
Gmail allows a similar feature and it seems safer in a distributed system than relying on everyone else to respect what happens after you send a raw message and an edit right after
Implementing this like Gmail would mean doing it server-side. Handling it in the client would be more error-prone, since your device would have to have a good connection in the future, and if it doesn't, handle retries and make sure never to double-post.
There's a last-edited time, which I think should provide a superset of that information.
considers
Maybe have clients/Web UI more-clearly highlight if a response predated the last parent edit, which is I think the case where that really becomes an issue.
Honestly, I haven't actually seen anyone involved in bad-faith edits in conversations here. I've even seen people regularly thank people who provide corrections before correcting their post to credit the correction. Obviously, that doesn't mean that it's true everywhere or will last, but from a community standpoint, that's one area where I've been pretty happy with people here.
Back-up/failover instances for communities and users.
Every user and every admin of a community should be able to assign a failover instance in case the main instance goes down temporarily or permanently. All relevant data (posts, upvotes, settings, password hashes, mod log) would be permanently syched so you could just switch over in case of a downtime and most importantly, no content would be lost.
If you implement a feature to set the failover instance as your new main instance, that would also implicitly allow you to migrate users and communities elsewhere.
I got tempbanned for 48 hours in a community recently after not noticing that a mod was objecting to some posts and had deleted a couple until after the ban went in place.
I'd kind of like to have some way to have a higher-priority indicator that a post was deleted or "message from moderator" or something. Preferably a different indicator from just "waiting regular messages", and a way to view mod warnings or messages from moderators.
Tags for posts
I want to be able to put alt text on an image post upload. Accessibility is cool.
It's an option on lemmy.today when doing an image post.
My guess is that it's probably just in a newer release, and it'll show up at the next update your home instance does.
lemmy.today is running 0.19.5.
lemmy.world, your home instance, is presently running 0.19.3.
That's great news, thank you! It's something I've been asking for since I first began using Lemmy, but there didn't seem to be interest in implementing it. I'm very glad to see that it's been reconsidered.
It is implemented on Lemmy 0.19.4. Lemmy.world is one of the few instances still running 0.19.3
Add an equivalent to multireddits. I miss that so much
That can be done client-side. I don't use the feature, but from a brief glance, it looks like the Android client I use when I'm on a phone, Eternity, supports it.
Probably slightly less efficient than supporting it at the API level.
The obvious one, tags and flairs
FYI: Tesseract and Photon both support those by putting [Tags] or [Flairs] at the beginning or end of the post title. Both make them clickable which will search for other posts containing the flair.
Lemmy does pretty much everything I want from this medium of communication. Wishlist features would be:
A way of scheduling posts within lemmy.
http://schedule.lemmings.world
Maybe a little icon that shows where things are being posted from. So if I see a user with a mastodon showing up in the feed with a formatting mistake ill know why.
That's the Fediverse icon next to each comment and post?
It would be nice for instances to have a monthly server cost that tracks donations.
Lemmy.zip has that on their home community !home@lemmy.zip
show me reports I have made.
Notification whenever there's something in the mod queue of a board I moderate. At least I don't see any such notification when using Voyager.
Yeah, user migration would be nice.
If it were a shift to simply using a keypair as the basis for identity, which would be a big change, then one could potentially transparently use any instance. That'd be neat from an instance reliability standpoint.
Keypair-based identity would also permit migrating an account from a permanently failed instance. Right now, the home instance is the authoritative source for the account. The problem with that is that if the instance goes away forever, then there's no authoritative source left to determine who controls a user account. One of the use cases that I'm worried about is a big instance going down because the admins get in a car crash or something, and it killing all the user reputation that's been built up, because nothing can be done after the permanent failure.
IIRC feddit.uk had a close call like this a while back.
More users that aren’t Americans talking about their politics would be nice.
The post you're responding to is explicitly asking for things that don't involve content on lemmy, but rather functionality in lemmy.
True. In the grand tradition of the internet I only responded to the headline.
Lol I've had the experience of others not from my country telling me what the real politics of my country are because they know better than the people living there, apparently. No thanks.
Comment type taxonomy:
-funny -informative -offtopic -redundant
Etc
Voters can select a category
Now I can browse in serious mode, funny mode, etc
Found the Slashdotter.
Auto mark reply notifications as read.
why? dont you want to read them?
No, I mean clicking on them and reading them doesn't mark them as read. You have to manually click the "Mark all as read" button or individually click the "mark as read" arrow button on each of the comments.
Block community in the 3 dots menu. No I don't know what that's called. I'm using firefox if that helps. I don't want an app thank you.
The "3 dots" menu is sometimes referred to as a "kebab menu" if the dots are vertical and a "meatballs menu" if the dots are horizontal. I think it's weird, but I have heard it used in instructional videos before.
Maybe try a different web app? Most 3rd party Lemmy webapps are miles ahead of Lemmy-UI when it comes to user experience.
Filter posts based on a keywords from the title/content.
Consolidation of communities with a sort of overlay.
Mods can choose to mirror the whole community. This way you can have a sort of unified community happening between instances instead of happening on each island.
Also mods can move a discussion if needed.
Just recently I have seen a three separate discussions across three different c/technology communities.
Resizeable inline images. At least some way to show them enlarged, the way one can with images that are posted. Kbin had it, and I'm sure mbin does, but the Lemmy Web UI does not, which means manually adding a link beneath the image if you want people to be able to conveniently view images full-size, particularly on touch interfaces.
Add technical depth by allowing communities to select a default "sort by most recent comment" like a forum. This is the key difference between ADHD content that focuses on time versus forums that focus on depth. Then find a way to integrate these deep threads into the Allfeed. Bridge the gap between forums with depth and PITA user names versus link aggregators with ADHD but recent info and broad scope.
Is this not what the "active" sorting does?
To some extent yes, but it is not a default option at the community level. The scope is only as a user setting overall.
I'm abstracting to analyze a question of why link aggregators do not naturally displace very technical niche forums. I don't believe that expecting the user to alter their overall sorting method is effective here. Nor do I believe that the pinned thread is an effective prioritization method to promote a more technical niche. In my opinion, the method of prioritization and promotion needs to be organic and democratically sourced as a fundamental mechanism that drives community behavior.
The part that I cannot intuitively work out is how to integrate the old niche threads with the aggregated feed in a way that is nonauthoritative or forced or feels like a narrative agenda. How to both enable content discovery while enabling depth is an interesting challenge that could IMO surpass any current or previous link aggregation platform's functionality and use in such a way as to antiquate all previous platforms.
Alongside others mentioned (tags/flairs, multi-communities, keyword filtering, etc.) another feature I'd like to see added/improved is notification settings.
Something like...
In account settings:
For others' posts/comments and per posts/comments:
With those settings you could more easily tune out all notifications or only opt into those you'd like to see, and opt out of those you're done with (say your post/comment got popular and you've had your fill from the replies).
Unrelated to notification settings, it would also be nice to be able to block communities from the front page via the ... More menu in the default web UI.
Yes, this is probably my single biggest one. Particularly:
opt out of those you’re done with (say your post/comment got popular and you’ve had your fill from the replies).
Being able to block link posts by host. It is the one of the reasons I use mbin more than lemmy.
Like, block/hide posts that go to specific domains? i.e hide any posts that link to Facebook?
(I develop a lemmy app and may be able to add that capability on the frontend)
Yes, for example blocking "reddit.com", "new.reddit.com", "old.reddit.com"...
Post title translations.
Save post as draft
Tagging. del.icio.us style tagging. LJ style tagging. as free-form as tumblr or as structured as AO3's tagging system. any tagging system. as long as there is tagging system.
I'd like to be able to mark specific top level posts as 'don't show me this again'.
This is available in Lemmy 0.19.5, which almost all instances use except Lemmy.world
Some sort of super community that are searchable (i.e. not something Clientside) and span multiple servers. The fragmentation of having the same few communities everywhere is my biggest issue here.
In general I want more and better discoverability of communities anywhere.
more and better discoverability of communities anywhere.
If you haven't yet, you may want to take a look at lemmyverse.net's community index/search. They run a spider that crawls the whole Threadiverse and builds an index of all communities on all instances.
Yeah, it's be great if a community could decide to link its feed with another community, essentially to make them one super-community that share the same content and members. Factorio, for example, has I think three communities. I'm sure there are many worse than that.
The mods should probably consider merging those communities.
!factorio@lemmy.world seems to be the most active ones, they other much less
Post flairs
Picture Albums that you can scroll through on an app.
Some sort of automatic down-sampling feature before posting, for images, video and maybe audio.
DeltaChat has this built in to minimise file-sizes before posting.
Something like this would reduce plenty of bandwith/processor use/carbon etc. Increase speed of loading pages.
With an option to click to see the original media too.
It would be really nice on less powerful hardware too. One picture gallery can eat all my RAM real fast.
I'm all for this.
Some way of grouping Communities other than by name (not very useful). E.G. search on 'Climate' and you don't get the name of one of the busiest communities.
In other words, group them a step up the taxonomy. Create 10 or 15 groups (sci/tech, history, music, culture, media, nature, issues, locations....), see what mods have to say about that list. (Could do worse than the Wikipedia taxonomy.)
You might want to have a look at Piefed topics: https://piefed.social/
In frontends, I'd like to have the option to not show displaynames, or at least show real usernames next to displaynames.
If you want to reference a user using @username@instance syntax, you need to know their username, and while the displaynames can be cute, I've just never seen a really compelling argument for them. I also haven't seen anyone abusing them yet, but they seem likely to be trouble from a "trying to impersonate someone else" standpoint.
Pronouns in display names are important
I've said before, but part of my biggest gripe with Lemmy is the process of curating a decent feed. A lot of new users will see the mess of posts in All, including political extremists, an ever growing list of fetish porn communities, and bottom of the barrel shitposts, and they won't be interested in spending a couple hours blocking and subscribing to things before the feed is usable.
One way to address this is to give instance admins better tools to curate a default subscriptions and block list for their users. Allow admins to create what they think is the most accessible feed, but also allow users to customize it as they see fit.
I whitelist rather than blacklist. I browse Subscribed normally. I think that under the existing system, that's the only realistic way to scale. Hit lemmyverse.net or similar periodically to look for new, interesting communities, but the whole thing is gonna be a firehose.
I do understand that BlueSky has some sort of "curated lists" feature that sounds interesting, and I've thrown around some ideas around having curation decoupled from community/instance bans and global voting.
lemmy:// (or fediverse://) protocol, to make linking content, users, communities, etc more universal across instances, apps, etcReddit Markdown lets one use italics inside links, like so:
I like [the author of *A Game of Thrones*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._R._Martin).
However, Lemmy does not presently support this syntax, renders it as:
I like the author of A Game of Thrones.
I frequently want to have partially-styled links like this, particularly italics.
EDIT: Okay, I just discovered that apparently this has been implemented since the last time I tried it. Thanks, devs!
option to get notifications when a post or a comment subtree gets a new comment. Especially (but not only) useful for your own posts, and for when you have commented on a topic whereyou are interested in not only the direct responses, but in the overall discussion.
to handle deleted content better: when a post or a comment is deleted, keep them openable, to still have the context readable
When you ask OP a question, then someone says "I'd like to know, too!" and OP only replies to the comment under yours.
and only I get notified. and only for that reply, if discussion continues in deeper replies I won't get notified
Allow me to upvote posts and comments within search.
Super-compact mode for posts.
Allow me to upvote posts and comments within search.
Tesseract and Photon both allow that :)
Maybe others, too, but I'm most familiar with those two since I've been involved in their development (and they're my daily drivers).
I love the Old Lemmy webiste, I wish there was a way to incorporate a RES type of extension for Lemmy
I mean, it's doable now, but I think that the limiting factor is just the userbase. More developers using the platform, more people interested in writing code for browser extensions.
There is a lemmy/kbin assistant extension for Firefox, which is far, far more basic than RES, but provides one critical feature that I regularly use -- being able to view a post on one's home instance. So people have done work on these.
Also, if by "Old Lemmy", you mean mlmym, that's not merely the website. It's an alternate Web UI that instances can run alongside the regular one. My home instance does so at https://old.lemmy.today/
EDIT: Your home instance does as well, at https://old.lemmy.world/
Linking one of the AO3 tag tutorials because tagging? is extremely powerful.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/41214669?view_full_work=true
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Aenhancement
(I think that's the official list.)
Ability to search Saved Posts, and RSS for them too like Reddit has.
I save a lot of handy things on Lemmy but it’s really difficult to find them again later. It also seems to sort by original post creation date instead of when I saved them so this makes it even more difficult to find later.
I'd love to see something similar to reddit enhancement suite.
RES is huge. Any specific must-have features?
UI improvements.
Such as?
UI is not good.
I think it should be like Photon.
The ability to hide posts that are the exact same but posted in Different places. It is very annoying to browse through 3,4,5 posts with the same text, same image and same poster just in different communities.
Detect AI prompts attached to images and not strip them from images on upload the way other EXIF data is.
Stripping EXIF location data to help keep people from being doxxed is one thing, but AI image generators try to make images with metadata to indicate that the images are AI generated, which helps avoid using them for training and lets people inspect how images are created. As of now, that gets stripped on upload. It's particularly obnoxious over in !imageai@sh.itjust.works.
EDIT: Even nicer would be the option to leave EXIF location data attached, and merely warn a user at upload time about location data and provide the option to strip it, as I can certainly imagine communities where people would really like to be able to include precise location data with their images.
The ability to subscribe to another instances bans.
Make it easier to join.
I'd really like for there to be an easy way to create polls.
There are a bunch of websites that provide polling services out there. Can link off-site.
I'd bet that they're probably more-resistant to stuffing the polls, if that's a concern, since they aren't tied to a Threadiverse identity, which is "cheap" -- someone can control many identities and that's an intended Threadiverse feature.
Another issue is that the messaging system today on the Threadiverse isn't really private, so if it's based on that and you want private polling...shrugs
Defo some good points! It's just as soon as those polls are on a third-party site i feel like a lot less people are going to bother/engage with the poll - instead of a simple click in the lemmy-ui.