PSA: Two major points of criticism regarding Lemmy's user experience will be addressed soon (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago by hardypart@feddit.de to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Firstly, there is the unstoppable flood of new posts that are added while browsing "All". Although this doesn't happen when using the Jerbea app, it sometimes renders "All" unusable in the browser.

This will be resolved once websockets are removed with the next update:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3008

Secondly, the issue of the same posts being displayed for days under "Hot". There is already a pull request for this, so it has been fixed and just needs to be implemented:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3076

Now, the only remaining points for me are:

Links to external instances should automatically be transformed when opened so that one can participate with the account of their own instance. For example, lemmy.world/c/memes should automatically become feddit.de/c/memes@lemmy.world.
Communities from different instances should be able to merge, allowing users to see the content of all communities across different instances.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] funkyb@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I posted this in Ask Lemmy but since it didn't get traction I'm gonna piggyback on the visibility of this thread:

As i learn my way around ActivityPub based services, what stands out to me the most is federation is very much exposed to the users. (That, or I still just haven’t wrapped my head around the architecture details and how they manifest in terms of user experience.)

Am I just misunderstanding this, or would the end-user experience be more fluid and functional if the federation mechanics were mostly ‘under the hood’. What I mean by that is - right now if there’s a community I would enjoy participating in that is located on a different instance, in order to do that I need to (a) know it exists in the first place, (b) know what instance it is on, and (c) explicitly tell my instance about its address in order to join.

Would it be possible to have some form of master index (replicated across instances - not a centralized service) along with a public standard for registering an instance/community on the index? And if something like that existed, couldn’t that push what is an inherently more technical detail to lower levels of the implementation, and make for a simpler UX by allowing every instance to expose a more complete list of communities to users from directly within whatever instance they choose to use?

[-] EthanolParty 3 points 1 year ago

This is probably the biggest issue I have with Lemmy right now. To make matters worse, it's really easy to miss how the system works. A lot of new users on smaller instances probably think this place is a ghost town because they don't see many communities in the directory. It's not ideal to have to use an external tool to find communities, then extra problematic that the actual process is so awkward: manually pasting the address from the external site in the search bar, then you get a "community not found" warning but ignore that, then the community will appear but it'll grab the old posts and not the comments. Weird.

I can accept that it would be too much if every single instance defaulted to a full local sync of every other community on every other instance, but they should at least show up in a list when searched for, IMO.