Yeah. Joining communities from other instances is a hassle. Kinda puts me off sometimes.
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Definitely a big problem. UX can make or break a service. I'm sure it's just a matter of time though :)
Really? I don’t get that. I go to the ‘communities’ button at the top, where they are sorted by population, so it’s easy to find some good ones right away. If I want to search something specific I type it in the search bar and there it is. Is it not that way for you? That seems easy to me
That's because you joined the largest community. It's much more cumbersome for smaller communities.
Indeed. The largest weak point for me.
I have to go to third party site where I can see a list of communities, find one, copy some url, go back to my instance and search then paste the url.
At this point I get nothing, or 404, or a nothing found error. Generally this is where it stalls, and i give up and come back half an hour later if I remember and try again.
This time the search may find the community, but has failed to do so several times. Still trying to subscribe to a pathfinder community which I started trying to do earlier this morning
That works easily when you want to join communities already on your instance. But if you want to search for other communities you need to go to https://browse.feddit.de/, search for them there, copy the url, then join. Also you cant sort that list by anything, you kinda need to know what you are looking for.
Its....a bit too complicated. I'm sure it will get better with time.
Being able to mark post as read, and have them be hidden from my feed. Or hide posts I have upvoted/downvoted.
Also it would be really nice to have the ability to group communities together from my view point. So instead of a single lemmy feed with all of my subscriptions mixed together I can have multiple feeds each based on say a single topic. Say I have a group called Gaming. and in that I have !gaming@lemmy.ml and !linux_gaming@lemmy.ml !gaming@beehaw.org etc.. etc.. I think this would also help the issue with having similar communities on multiple instances. For example We have !technology@lemmy.ml !technology@beehaw.org I could subscribe to both and just use a single group to view them both. Instead of having to view one at a time.
Edit,
Oh here is another one. It would be great if lemmy links were automatically converted to your local instance.
For example someone linked this https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/61827
Sure this works for everyone but it takes you out of your lemmy instance if your not using lemmy.blahaj.zone. I am a user of lemmy.ml, so from my prospective going to lemmy.blahaj.zone doesn't give me any options to interact with that content. I would need to manually find that post from my instance that I am logged into. From my prospective that link should have been converted into lemmy.ml link and go here https://lemmy.ml/post/1160417 so I can seamlessly interact with it.
I'd love to see a poll option :)
Fix the deletion of comments so that the content is removed rather than just flagged as deleted.
This is my number one wish as well. I'm well aware that people can archive or snapshot my comments/content, and the site can keep backup servers, and that we should assume that things we post online should be treated as if it were there forever, but no one can convince me that any of these situations is remotely comparable to not being able to delete my own public-facing content.
It's also the number one concern I've heard from people on reddit who are considering migrating to Lemmy, but are undecided.
I really wish they'd fix this.
Software engineer here. Historically we started not hard-deleting anything because sometimes software does bad things and we never want to accidentally delete anything that could be important since then the only way to undo it is to restore the database from a backup. So it's better/safer to literally not allow the application to ever delete anything from the database.
That being said, I could see an option in ActivityPub to delete comments, but with the distributed nature of Lemmy you would have to trust every server you federate with to listed to the protocol and delete the comments too since they are stored on the other servers as well.
Trust of federated servers isn’t the issue. We already trust federated servers to publish the text we wrote and not some alternative version the owner wanted us to say.
The problem is instance owners don’t even have the option to obey deletion requests. They want to help delete your content but they cannot.
The whole “what’s the point of building it if there’s a possibility one dude doesn’t obey the request” is whataboutism.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be able to hard delete comments, I'm just explaining why the Lemmy developers might not have started with hard-deleting comments. I agree with you we should have the option and it should propagate regardless of any instance settings.
My point in mentioning other servers not deleting your comments is that ActivityPub is an open standard. Technically someone can write a Lemmy competitor that federates with your instance and does not implement the hard deletion of comments. It's allowable under the protocol. That doesn't mean the feature isn't worth implementing, it just means there are caveats to "this comment disappears off the Internet forever" like we'd like.
Automatic discovery of communities from instances your community knows about.
That would be awesome and make for a good user experience.