Lemmy User Feedback and Improvement Thread: Share Your Complaints, Suggestions, and Ideas

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

I’d like to invite you all to share your thoughts and ideas about Lemmy. This feedback thread is a great place to do that, as it allows for easier discussions than Github thanks to the tree-like comment structure. This is also where the community is at.

Here’s how you can participate:

Post one top-level comment per complaint or suggestion about Lemmy.
Reply to comments with your own ideas or links to Github issues related to the complaints.
Be specific and constructive. Avoid vague wishes and focus on specific issues that can be fixed.
This thread is a chance for us to not only identify the biggest pain points but also work together to find the best solutions.

By creating this periodic post, we can:

Track progress on issues raised in previous threads.
See how many issues have been resolved over time.
Gauge whether the developers are responsive to user feedback.

Your input may be valuable in helping prioritize development efforts and ensuring that Lemmy continues to meet the needs of its community. Let’s work together to make Lemmy even better!

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Comments

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PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The issue with Lemmy’s “all feed” is that the largest or most popular instances tend to dominate what appears there, which undercuts the ability of users on niche or smaller instances to discover content truly relevant to their specific interests. This make different instances feel less distinct and reduces the value of joining a niche instance.

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- naught101@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I use subscribed feeds, sorted by “scaled”. It pushes stuff from smaller communities I’m interested in up higher. Scaled doesn’t work that well on All though. It does mean I need to subscribe to things first, but I generally just subscribe to everything I’m interested in. I also browse All sorted by Top 6h regularly, to see what else is happening. Pretty good combo.
  
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- Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  If you REALLY want to browse All, try the “New Comments” sort
  
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- OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  PieFed's categories of communities / Topic areas does this. When I used Lemmy I never found anything remotely close to that, but perhaps the best was to (1) visit each and every community that you want to check up on individually, and/or (2) use New rather than Hot or Top... and then be prepared to block hundreds of communities that you never want to see content from, like sports or individual locations (cities, towns, stateships, regions, countries, etc.).
  
  PieFed also combines all comments across all cross-posts, reversing the fragmentation effect from having too many communities split across many instances.
  
  You all on Lemmy need to catch up!:-P
  
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- brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  +100
  
  The default “hot” sorting algorithm needs to prioritize smaller communities. Yes, I know we have new comments and scaled, but a classic UX principle is most users use the defaults.
  
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  - Blaze@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Piefed has multicommunities piefed.fediverse.observer/list
    
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- Cris_Color@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I think you might benefit from trying the “local” feed, which is just your home instance :)
  
  It could perhaps be better communicated though, but I’m not sure what framing or label might make it more clear what local means for less technical folks
  
  It might just be something people need to learn because the fediverse is a different thing than traditional social platforms. But I don’t think that possibility should stop us from improving clarity if we can think of a good way to do so :)
  
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- Auth@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Try All + scaled it order active posts and scales it so its not dominated by large communties… Also yeah its expected large communities will dominate an all inclusive feed. They product the most content and have the most users.
  
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  - aaaa@piefed.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    No, instead scaled sort makes the feed dominated by single users posting the same thing to 5 similar communities. Or a community's single moderator posting 5 or 12 things at once to a community with no users
    
    I find it far less helpful when browsing all.
    
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- TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I hear you, but this is a problem that I’ve solved by browsing the splash as Posts/All/New. It helps to catch rando posts that I wouldn’t normally stumble across.
  
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- PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Allowing a user-configurable option to sort posts based solely on the current instance would address this by making the content feed more localized and personalized, helping each instance maintain its unique character and fostering community discovery without being overshadowed by larger instances.
  
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  - Steve@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    That’s exactly what the Local feed is for.
    If you don’t want All, don’t use All Because All will give you All, not Local. If you want Local use Local.
    
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  - can@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Sorting by Scaled, which by design puts emphasis on posts from smaller/less active communities, helps s lot.
    
    I know it’s been said already and it’s not a perfect solution but for now it’s an under appreciated first step.
    
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kingofras@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Thanks for reaching out to the community. Here are mine.

universal tagging (when you friend or follow a user, whatever they tag (comms or users) is shared with you until you unfollow them

community aggregators. For big communities, merge crossposts automatically on bigger communities like !dataisbeautiful@lemmy.ml and !dataisbeautiful@lemmy.world and !dataisbeautiful@mander.xyz and !dataisbeautiful@lemmit.online

better federated moderation. Notifications of mod actions not just on your own instance, but everywhere. When a post is deleted by a mod for a reason, include the OP in the mod message so you can rewrite or remove the offending part of the message and repost the essence. I can imagine lots of scenarios where devs/mods don’t think that’s a good idea, but some of us didn’t read all the rules and didn’t mean any offense.

Deeper publicly available voting analytics (on post level first but also comment level would be good) when you click on […] next to the metadata, get a voting pie chart that shows which instance the upvotes and downvotes came from. Even an barebones analysis tool that checks if a disproportionate % of up or down votes came from an instance that is rather small or only recently federated.

This may be client related, but push notifications on comments, mod actions and DMs would be nice too.
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- Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  community aggregators. For big communities, merge crossposts automatically on bigger communities
  
  PieFed does this
  
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  - nokturne213@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    This post is about Lemmy however.
    
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spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Personal labels/tags or whatever they are called for both users and communities would be awesome to have in the standard lemmy front end. I think some apps or other formats might have them, but I do like the default lemmy interface and they would be extremely handy to have saved by an account for personal reminders.

Some examples would be the ability to set personal reminders for uncommon rules on specific communities or who has good takes on some random topic. There are just so many of both and it can be hard to keep similarly named things straight.

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- Blaze@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Piefed has flairs for both posts and users
  
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  - spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    The last time I checked the piefed layout options weren’t my thing, but I’ll give it another shot.
    
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- wiki_me@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  For user tagging. see this . its implemented on the server side but not on the UI side. give it a thumbs up maybe it will help the developers prioritize it.
  
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- can@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I would love a tagging standard. I have a lot on Sync, and while none are critical, it would be nice to be able to transfer them over to another app.
  
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Auth@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The ability to block posts by keyword would be nice. The ability to merge communities and have lemmy move the subscriptions over to the merged community, mastodon does something similar with moving accounts so it is possible.

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- Blaze@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  PieFed has keyword filters and multicommunities
  
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Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Can we get polls?

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- Skavau@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Piefed has polls
  
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remon@ani.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
A multi-community feature that allows you to group communities into a single feed is urgently needed.

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- Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  pretty sure Lemmy v1.0 will have that
  
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- Blaze@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Piefed has that piefed.fediverse.observer/list
  
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- dumples@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Agreed. I want to be to join them together. The only real difficulty will be for comments. How do they get federated between different instances
  
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  - Blaze@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Piefed has that piefed.fediverse.observer/list
    
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reddig33@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Lemmy needs a hierarchy similar to Usenet, or a way to tag each c/ with keywords to make it easier for the user or client software to block huge swaths of topics the user is not interested in.

Examples: Memes. Sports. News. Politics. Entertainment. Music.

It would improve signal to noise ratio in the All feed, allowing users to find new content they are interested in, rather than simply 100 dupes of things they are not.

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- Steve@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The All feed is for All. If you don’t want All don’t use All.
  
  It’s designed as a White List system, with subscriptions. You pick the things you want to see. You’re asking for a Black List system, where you see everything accept what you don’t want. That only works while things are small. As they grow, Black Lists become much larger, and more difficult to manage. When you get to the point where their are thousands of communities with tens of thousands of posts every second, they become useless.
  
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  - reddig33@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    The All feed is useless because it’s the same meme or news story posted 100 times each day because everyone thinks they have to start their own sub for memes or news stories.
    
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- Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  doesn’t PieFed do this?
  
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  - rimu@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I've been lurking in threads like this for 2+ years, and coding accordingly.
    
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Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Remotely open post, similar to remote follow

I think this would greatly reduce confusion for new users

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2318

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- Steve@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That would require some kind of local client side software.
  
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  - Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    have you seen the “Subscribe from Remote Instance” feature that already exists in Lemmy?
    
    Image
    
    Could be identical to this
    
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SheeEttin@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Are you affiliated with the project? Because I don’t think the devs are tracking this post. You should contribute to the project itself: github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

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- can@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Either way there’s value in perspective from different audiences. Not everyone is going to make an account and post on github.
  
  We need to remember how many users aren’t even registered to an instance.
  
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  - brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Still, the post is worded as if it’s official and devs will be looking at this, though technically ambiguous.
    
    If it’s not, I want to take the time to post on Github instead of shouting into a space the devs will not see.
    
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- naught101@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  although that isn’t the place for random complains. Well laid out bug reports and feature requests, for sure though.
  
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- lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Requires Github (/Microsoft). Not good.
  
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shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
NSFW only filter. Flip the existing one, add that as radio button with the NSFW block.

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DougHolland@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’d like the ability to block users when I stumble over an imbecile while browsing, but I still need to see the blocked user’s comments in groups that I moderate.

At present, user blocks are absolute, and don’t take moderation into consideration. This means, since I moderate a group, I can’t block users. If I do, and they later post to the group I moderate, I won’t see their posts or comments.

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DuskyRo@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
JPEGXL(JXL) support.

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- Eldritch@piefed.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  While I would love this personally. I think this is still a bit of a browser support issue Etc. But yes jpeg XL please. Smaller size for similar fidelity as JPEG. Even lossless with transparencies much better sizes than PNG. Though I know there is traction on the PNG side again and they are talking of implementing something other than lzma compression. That's still the future. Jpeg XL is here and now. Not As tied as webp is to a single company Period and not quite as esoteric as avif is.
  
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- irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  This is more of a browser issue than a lemmy issue.
  You can post a link to any image, it’d break for most people though.
  
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individual@toast.ooo ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
how do I follow specific users?

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- Steve@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Use Mastodon. Lemmy is built around topics, not people.
  
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  - TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I feel as though I’m still missing something about Mastadon that others have absorbed and moved past. There was remarkably little content there, aside from the spam shotgunned into my feed by the few brand/city official accounts that I subbed to… What’s the appeal? I set it to display the rando posts, but it appeared to be literally that, random shitposting the way that people scream into the void of Twitter or Bluesky…
    
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- irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Mbin and piefed would be better for that.
  
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- Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  try Mbin joinmbin.org
  
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- Blaze@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  PieFed has that
  
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- fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  You’d want mastadon for that. Lemmy is for following communities. Someone could make their own community if they wanted something for just them.
  
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PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Over the past few days, I’ve witnessed a remarkable surge in the number of communities on browse.feddit.de. What started with 2k communities quickly grew to 4k, and now it has reached an astonishing 8k. While this exponential growth signifies a thriving platform, it also brings forth challenges such as increased fragmentation and the emergence of echo chambers. To tackle these issues, I propose the implementation of a Cross-Instance Automatic Multireddit feature within Lemmy. This feature aims to consolidate posts from communities with similar topics across all federated instances into a centralized location. By doing so, we can mitigate community fragmentation, counter the formation of echo chambers, and ultimately foster stronger community engagement. I welcome any insights or recommendations regarding the optimal implementation of this feature to ensure its effectiveness and success.

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- naught101@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3100 - Co-hosting communities across instances (e.g. “sharding”)
  
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SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I would like to be able to comment and vote on items on the modlog.

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PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The decentralized nature of Lemmy, while appealing in theory, creates significant frustration in practice due to widespread instance blocking. Finding an ideal instance becomes a daunting task, as users must navigate a complex web of inter-instance politics and restrictions. The only reliable solutions seem to be either hosting a personal instance—a technical hurdle for many—or simply hoping that your chosen instance’s admins align with your preferences and don’t block communities you enjoy. This politicking ultimately undermines the platform’s potential.

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SolarPunker@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Don’t use github, don’t post like an AI.

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i_ben_fine@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I don’t like anybody else here. Please leave.

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npdean@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I am not able to import data from a backup file. It always says “Try importing or exporting after a few minutes”

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PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
There were several issues on GitHub regarding proposals on how to solve the low visibility of small instances. However, after the Scaled Sort was implemented, all those issues were closed, yet the problem persists. I continue to use Reddit the same as before because I primarily used it for niche communities, which are lacking here. The few times I’ve posted to a niche community here, I’ve either received no answers or been subject to drive-by downvotes, likely from users not even subscribed to the community. As a result, I now only post on Lemmy when the post is directed to a large community, and I use Reddit for the rest.

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pogodem0n@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
(Note that I am not sure how much of this is depends on my client - Voyager.)

Ability to filter out posts made by people from the instances I have blocked, on communities that I did not block.

For example: feddit.org seems to have blocked all IPs from my country so I cannot see any posts made by them (I can only see their crossposts).

However, people on that instance can post to lemmy.world and while I can see the post text, any media fails to load. Sometimes, when I am not lazy, I use a VPN to see such posts in detail.

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awbvious@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
More URL tag functionality!

?Top=1Y&Start=20240101 This would give the top results of the last year, according Jan 1st 2024 (so top posts of last year). One of things I most dislike about Reddit is not being able to find top content, but as it was in the past (e.g. before a subreddit went to s*** or voting became inflated and top of all time is suddenly everything from last month).

?Max=100 This would limit the amount of results you see, so if you start doom scrolling eventually you would just get no results at all.

just about any setting you can set with an account I don’t want to login to things, if there’s a setting that can be done via account, it can probablf also be done via URL tag. Then I can bookmark it and not have to login.
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PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Lemmy’s privacy is a joke compared to other social media since all your posts are permanently public under your profile with no option to restrict visibility, meaning not only can anyone see your outdated cringe-worthy posts anytime, but any tech company could probably de-anonymize your profile just by looking at the topics you post in.

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Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Chat view could show single comment of context

this would be almost identical to old school forums, clubsall does this too even with posts that originated from Lemmy

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2544

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Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

markdown element for datetime with automatic timezone conversions

like how Discord uses hammertime

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2482

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Sackeshi@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Most communities are almost dead, we need to make a effort to pull enmass people from reddit to here

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