So much stuff about so many topics in many different communities. Then it all went sour, and I’m now here.

The main things that made me like reddit were RES and Apollo (or Alien Blue before reddit bought it). I haven’t used non-RES reddit or the reddit app in so long because I never enjoyed them. Also thanks for reminding me to cancel my reddit Premium 🙃

I pretty much liked it because my first interaction with talking to people on the internet was web forums, and reddit felt basically like a bunch of those tied together. I never have really been able to get into most other social sites like Twitter, because I prefer to follow topics, not people, and could never actually find enough people I wanted to follow to get any real use out of those platforms. Honestly, I like Lemmy enough for that as is, all I’d really want is for it is for it to grow enough to get back active communities for more specific, niche topics, and general improvements to performance and the UI (in particular, while the current web version is usable, it does seem a bit slow and buggy at times, doing things like loading a bunch of posts on the top of the page after one has scrolled down, giving the appearance of jerkily scrolling back up on it’s own. Also some of the buttons, particularly the collapse thread one, seem just a bit small to the point I sometimes miss them.)

Most notably though, I do feel like Lemmy could benefit from a better way to find, organize, and subscribe to communities, especially ones from other instances. Having to go to another instances webpage, where one is no longer logged in, view their communies, then go back to one’s own instance, find the community page, search that exact name and instance with an ! added, then have it find no results despite your instance actually finding it and not telling you, requiring you to refresh and search it again just to finally subscribe, is a major annoyance, especially when to interact with a given topic, one may have to find and subscribe to multiple communities on different instances. What I would ideally want would be 1) a way to search the names (or even better, some kind of tag system telling what a community is actually for) of all the communities on federated servers, not just the ones others have looked for before, and a way to view another federated instence’s community page within one’s own instance, to just subscribe to ones one likes. I think it also would be useful to be able to create “groups” of communities, just as a client side thing for a given user, which could be viewed like a community and would give a feed composed of the combined feeds from all the communities one had grouped together. One would need it clearly marked in the gui exactly what community a given posts was from, and one would need to be aware of rule differences between those communities as a user, but I feel like it would seriously mitigate some of the downsides of having lots of little communities by letting a user view them as one big one. Ive seen other users suggest this elsewhere, some wanted it to be automatic based on tags of some sort, but tbh I feel like I’d greatly prefer it be up to the individual to create one’s own such groupings and manually curate them.

I mainly like the enormous variety of topics discussed in one place. No need to visit various forums, it’s all just there on Reddit. I hope the whole federation aspect of Lemmy gets a more streamlined feel to replicate this experience.

Because of the various instances of Lemmy it’s inevitable that overlapping communities will exist. It would be cool if you could create multilemmies, for lack of a better name, where multiple communities can be grouped in a single view to combine them.

Lemmy already has the core features of communities, threads, etc. An easier onboarding is key to growing right now. Many people get confused, tho perhaps that will shift with time. Mastodon-esque account migration would also be nice. I think I’d like to see solid multi-reddits. Some nice way to have multi-instance communities would help with scalability imo.

The Drama🍿 I mean, err, the beautiful communities about everything imaginable!