1y ago

What are the features Lemmy is missing that Reddit has?

122 comments

Honestly sheer numbers.
- This. I haven’t seen one LBD on lemmy so far!
  
  LBD
  Lewy Body Dementia?

Multireddits.
- 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.
- Summit gives the ability to do multi-communities.

Users.
- 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.
  
  This
- There's dozens of us! Dozens!
- You mean bots and karma farmers?

Users
- 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.
- We need some of them karma farming bots that make 80% of the posts over there.

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.

User and post flairs
- This thread is making me love lemmy so much 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.

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.

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

Small silly subs, like shaqholdingthings
- And about six thousand highly byzantine cat subs.

Album posts. I'd like to share related pics in one post. Not sure how to do this if it's already there.
- it's kind of possibile, you just add more than one image to the post
  
  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.

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.

Finding "subLemmy's". I just browse the main page and block the sublemmys i dont like.
- 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.

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.
- 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.
- 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.

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.
- doesn't the app embed the video anyway? at least for the more common ones

Open in a new window/tab.
- Middle mouse click
- Sadly the Devs are pretty keen on not adding that feature.
  
  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.

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.

None that matter. Lemmy doesn't have flair or awards or live chat or NFT avatars or any of that bullshit. And that's not a bad thing.
- Post and user flairs would be nice, it's helpful in certain community types.
  The rest though, I'm fine without
  
  Flair is nice. They remind me of old school "signatures" on forums. Awards can also be nice, but I would prefer those more like accolades in CSGO; marking posts as helpful or funny or whatever with a little icon. Not random, arbitrary things you pay money for.
  Most of the things Lemmy doesn't have that Reddit does are the things only added to monetize. They could be repurposed for a more practical use on Lemmy and that would be great.
- Lemmy is basically reddit in 2010, which is awesome
- flairs would be really helpful though. i can filter for what I'm specifically looking for, or filter what I don't out, if there's flairs for that

A way to easily find and join subs, from my phone/in the app, so I can have my own feed. I’m not willing to set my stuff up on my computer. I’ve worked in IT for over twenty years and I hate doing anything on my computer anymore and can’t get myself to even try. It’s a me problem but it didn’t exist with Reddit. From Apollo I could find, subscribe, leave subs and have my own custom feed. I’d still use Reddit instead if they didn’t kill third party apps. But they did, so I try to make this work but it’s sucks trying to see content so I just don’t spend much time here either, which is fine, I’ve taken to doing crosswords instead when I’m looking to pass some time.
- Just joined Lemmy because I found the Voyager app which functions almost identically to the Apollo app.
  Voyager has a search function that lets you search Lemmy communities by word and phrases. I just used it to start my own sub feed.
  
  I’ll try it out. I use wefwef and it has a search function but theirs no browse and the search barely finds anything that’s out there.

Currently? Pictures.

A central place where everything happens. Or just the illusion of that.
Lemmy does not feel the same between instances/servers, and that makes everything seem smaller.
The only reason there was a small spike in lemmy users was because the competition entered phase 3 of their enshittening. Just like Mastadon lives off twitter going downhill. It’s not that the product is great, it’s just that it mimics a successful service and that service is going to shit.
- That's why I browse "Everything" instead of restricting myself to an instance. I then block communities that I'm not interested in, and also make use of keyword filters in Sync to block unwanted stuff.
  
  note that "everything" doesn't mean everything. It will show you all posts your local instance pulled in via federation (e.g. when someone else on your instance subscribed to it). Depending on how active the instance is you are on, it will have very different results
- Why do you say it doesn't feel the same between instances? The only problem I've seen is subscriber counts not federating.
  
  Might just be that the default filter differ between sites and a lot of the servers I looked at in the beginning had local posts as default.
  So it was like looking at 12 different slashdot’s, each with its own stories

Flairs and polls
- A nice thing about lemmy is when we get polls they wouldn’t force you to load a webpage just to use them in third party apps.

Hasn't it been revealed that the devs are tankies who straight up refuse to implement features that they feel would undermine the cause?
For example, they have a hard coded Blocklist. There have been tickets to change this to instance implemented. Every time this comes up, the devs claim that this has already been implemented and lock discussion. However if you actually look at the commit sha the hard coded Blocklist is still in place.
- Genuine question: What would be preferable to a hardcoded blocklist?
  
  They already allow instance admins to add to the Blocklist. They could simply remove the hard coded one.

I know some unofficial apps already have it but I like the idea of karma. Like nothing crazy with algorithms but just the summary of all the down/updoots on profiles

One thing I could use is a good desktop web frontend. On desktop I’d much rather browse Reddit(old+res) than any of the clients I have found. All of the clients are missing usable keyboard navigation, or the interface is too clunky for my monitor.
- Check out old.lemmy.world!
  
  Thanks. That’s definitely the best frontend available for me.
- Check if your instance supports the "old Lemmy" frontend. Something like old.lemmy.ca
- https://github.com/vmavromatis/Lemmy-keyboard-navigation

RES
- my script covers the keyboard navigation part of RES if it's any help https://github.com/vmavromatis/Lemmy-keyboard-navigation

I used the hide post feature on Reddit as my main way of browsing to keep topics I was done with from clogging my feed and keeping me from seeing new things.
No option to hide here on Lemmy.
- you can hide read posts
  
  On reddit, i can automatically hide posts that i have already upvoted. That keeps the frontpage full of fresh posts.
  
  Is there a way to individually hide? I only hide the ones I've already engaged with or decided not to engage with on Reddit, not every post I see.
- You can do that on Boost. Also mark as read when voting. With the hiding read selection, your feed stays clean and new.

Gold. I don't really care for the excessive awards they introduced in new Reddit, but gold in OG Reddit was a nice way to highlight and recognize really helpful or creative posts. Even though Lemmy is still pretty new, there have been folks submitting some really detailed and helpful or clever stuff, and it's a shame that they're going unnoticed.
Oh, and we're also missing an r/BestOf

Ampersands. I thought it was just me but apparently not
Edit: works fine incomments, but I keep seeing them replaced with "&" in titles.
- &'s
- &&&
  
  &&&&

The main technical feature on reddit absent on lemmy that I can think of is live chat, but if Lemmy does that at all, it should probably be done somewhat differently.
Mostly it is about the user population. Maybe Reddit's is getting worse now, but for a while it was at least a little bit representative of the real world, while Lemmy has always been niche. That's not just a matter of numbers, either.
- Fuck that live chat shit... It didn't belong on Reddit even and just felt forced or shoehorned in because the idiots in charge eventually thought that's what "social media" should have.
- I hope live chat is not on the development roadmap.

122 comments