better cross-instance user experience. Like now if you want to post to another instance you have to use the search bar and pray, right? Or is there a better way? If there's a better way, I couldn't find it. In general more streamlined "community discovery" features.
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2022
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Asklemmy
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At the moment it seems a big part of the internet thinks Lemmy is a far left extremist platform. I think Lemmy would be better off without that label.
That label is going to be hard to shake. Both lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml are pretty explicitly far left in intent.
Listen, I understand people's viewpoints on this but I'd much rather have the website be "Fuck nazis" far-left than "I want to murder people because of their ethnicity" far-right. Anything other than that is complacent towards some hateful shit.
Far left
Correct.
Extremist
What?
Is it far left?
Lemmy.ml or all of lemmy?
If you mean the former, through my experience chatting with folks here, lemmy.ml is mixed and diverse since most newcomers sign up there instead of browsing through other instances (probably because it's most active but that doesn't matter since there's federation). However, lemmy.ml is officially leftist as the sidebar states (something controversial and witnessed many debates).
Regarding the latter, while lemmy can be said to be not in favor of a specific ideology since the present instances are from all sides of the political spectrum. There are as well instances that aren't attached to a political ideology which is something to be encouraged on the website. The admins (also mods of lemmy.ml) have explicitly declared their leftist sentiments but outside of lemmy.ml I see no issue with that.
Not in my opinion, what is yours?
There's some far-left takes on Lemmy for sure. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, but it does limit growth when Lemmy.ml, which ultimately is the main instance, advertises it.
Thereβs some far-left takes on Lemmy for sure. Not that thereβs anything inherently wrong with that
Absolutely. And I'd go as far as to defend both lemmy.ml and lemmygrad's right to run their instances any way they want.
Lemmy.ml, which ultimately is the main instance
Not by any metrics, IMO. I think it's been explicitly stated by the admins that lemmy.ml is not a main instance or a flagship instance. It's not a general instance but a "community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts". The devs doesn't even recommend lemmy.ml on join-lemmy.org, but rather two general purpose instances instead.
Of course, promoting that it's run by the devs do give off some pretty strong "official/main" vibes to any users.
Saying that lemmy.ml is the main instance is somewhat contributing to the problem, no offense intended. What we should say is that there isn't any main instance, and that size doesn't matter since we're all (in theory) federated. If anything, users should check out join-lemmy.org/instances for a meta-community that seems like a good fit.
but it does limit growth
I believe that people confuse the difference between Lemmy, the federated platform, and Lemmy.ml, the federated social news aggregator. If new users had a better knowledge on how everything is interconnected instead of the standard monolithic islands, maybe they wouldn't seek out the "main" or even biggest instances for a fear of missing out.
Lemmy.ml is not the main instance. There is no main instance. That's the point of the fediverse.
I would a UX designer and force their feedback to be accepted. I've personally grown accustom to Lemmy's UI, but it took me way longer than most sites.
- Communities having names and URLs misaligned is an antifeature
- Creating a post requiring to subscribe first is an antifeature
- UX rule of proximity has improved a lot over time actually, was going to write about this but all my complaints seem to be resolved
- Lemmy UI is very customizable, but the default white and green theme sucks
Actually, the more I think about it, Lemmy's UX has improved a lot. Inbox used to be a nightmare, it works pretty great now.
#2 is fixed in the next release btw.
What does #1 mean?
Point 1 refers to the "Name" and "Display name". For example it's cumbersome to have cases like "Programmer Humor" pointing to "/c/programmerhumor" and "Lemmy Support" pointing to "/c/lemmy_support"
That to me is a very necessary feature, for at least two reasons.
- Internationalization: URLs are always latin chars, which would exclude any non-latin community or usernames.
- More complex community names. You can see how ridiculous reddit community names can get, because they don't allow spaces or non-latin characters, in either community or usernames. Spaces specifically is a necessary one for both, and URLs wouldn't permit that.
Working on the web interface to achieve better web browser compatibility and performance.
I'd like to reference this blog post by the mastodon devs from a few days ago. Joinmastodon.org just had a redesign/relaunch. Considering they're further ahead in the same game, there's probably some useful insight that can be gleaned from there.