I like Lemmy a lot, but when you share a URL it's just an ID number. Compare that to Reddit, where you can get a lot more information on what you're about to look at just from the URL alone.

lemmy.ml/post/27659153 vs
old.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/co…

Are there any plans to make Lemmy URLs more meaningful?

Nutomic

2025-03-25 11:40:36

Lemmy AMA March 2025

In the last weeks Lemmy has seen a lot of growth, with thousands of new users. To welcome them we are holding this AMA to answer questions from the community. You can ask about the beginnings of Lemmy, how we see the future of Lemmy, our long-term goals, what makes Lemmy different from Reddit, about internet and social media in general, as well as personal questions.

We'd also like to hear your overall feedback on Lemmy: What are its greatest strengths and weaknesses? How would you improve it? What's something you wish it had? What can our community do to ensure that we keep pulling users away from US tech companies, and into the fediverse?

Lemmy and Reddit may look similar at first glance, but there is a major difference. While Reddit is a corporation with thousands of employees and billionaire investors, Lemmy is nothing but an open source project run by volunteers. It was started in 2019 by @[url=https://lemmy.ml/u/dessalines]Dessalines[/url] and @[url=https://lemmy.ml/u/nutomic]Nutomic[/url], turning into a fulltime job since 2020. For our income we are dependent on your donations, so please contribute if you can. We'd like to be able to add more full-time contributors to our co-op.

We will start answering questions from tomorrow (Wednesday). Besides @[url=https://lemmy.ml/u/dessalines]Dessalines[/url] and @[url=https://lemmy.ml/u/nutomic]Nutomic[/url], other Lemmy contributors may also chime in to answer questions:

• @flamingos
• @dullbananas
• @phiresky
• @sleeplessone

Here are our previous AMAs for those interested.

• August 2023
• January 2024

Lemmy - Donate

^{join-lemmy.org}

What are its greatest strengths and weaknesses? How would you improve it?

There are some more obvious things, like mod tooling, but I'm gonna concentrate on smaller, niche UX issues that I think arise from how it is designed already, because I think there are probably already enough voices who will speak up for the bigger things.

• Inconsistent language UX between lemmy-ui and Jerboa. Specifically, that Jerboa provides no way to specify the language of a post or comment.
• Inconsistent parsing of markdown between lemmy-ui and Jerboa. Specifically. ^Superscript^ and ~subscript~ work fine on single words, but ^multiple words in superscript^ ~or in subscript~ do not display correctly in lemmy-ui. They do in Jerboa.

It's bad enough that third-party apps do these things (and others, like spoiler text) without following the spec consistently. But can they really be blamed when even the two main first-party UIs don't do it right? The post/comment language feature is awesome, as is the fact that you can do such a wide variety of syntax including subscript. But if users are not getting a consistent experience with these across platforms, it leads to confusion.

• Spoiler text syntax is clumsy. I like the idea of having collapsible text, but ::: spoiler [display text] is an insanely wordy way of doing it. In what other context is markdown do anything similar to requiring the literal text spoiler? It would be great if (a) an inline spoiler text syntax could be implemented, similar to >!Reddit's!< or ||Discord's||, and (b) if a more elegant collapsible text syntax could be created.
• Lemmy has a nasty habit of transforming user input. I just found out it converts your backslashes into forward slashes (see this comment), but a while ago I noticed that it completely removes text posted between angle brackets , which is annoying when trying to write pseudo-XML. {does it allow braces?} [square brackets?]. It feels to me like a relatively lazy attempt to sanitise user inputs, and it creates a poor UX, especially since I'm sure prepared statements and other safe data handling is employed. In my opinion any time you're changing what a user wrote, that's an anti-pattern. If you can't just leave it how it is, it's better to just block posting with a clear error message explaining why

Basically, I'd just like to see an overall focus on the user experience and how it all fits together as a system.

Also my little pet feature: keyboard navigation. Back on that other site, before the redesign, there was incredible keyboard navigation thanks to the Enhancement Suite. j/k to navigate up/down through comments. Enter to collapse. a/z to up/downvote. Etc. It's a delight to use, and is a big part of the reason I could never move to the redesign, before I came over here. Not having that is a big drawback IMO.

edit: looks like the angle brackets thing was . Still need the backslash thing fixed.

edit 2: I was just reminded of another example of the lemmy-ui vs Jerboa confusion, as well as another example of well-intentioned by ultimately anti-patternesque transformation of user text: how user and Community mentions are handled.

@nutomic@lemmy.ml will not be a hyperlink for viewers in lemmy-ui, but /u/nutomic@lemmy.ml will be...despite the latter being generally not the preferred way to do it. lemmy-ui also does this awkward thing where if you use the autofill suggestions when typing a name, it wraps them in a hard-instanced URL instead of the better UX of taking someone to their profile on your instance: @dessalines@lemmy.ml.

Communities are even weirder. Allowing the autofill of !announcements@lemmy.ml will create a hard-instanced URL ([!community@domain](https://domain/c/community)), but then the parser ignores this and creates a URL to the user's instance. If, instead, URLs went where the user's text input says they go, but the autofill would default to naked Community mentions such as !announcements@lemmy.ml, this would be a much better experience.

Meanwhile, Jerboa doesn't have an autofill capability for users or Communities. Users who are mentioned with /u/ are not linked, while users who are linked with @ get a link that is handled within the user's instance, regardless of whether it's a hard-instanced link or a naked mention. Communities are also always handled within the user's instance.

Hi! As you might remember, i've been pushing for this platform for quite some time so i'll just dump ideas in a pretty annoying way, hope you'll spare me :3

• do you realize that the power of the threadiverse is that a forum can even fully exist alone and the federation between them is a plus while for microblogging it's kinda a shit to not have the big reach? basically, are you going to bring lemmy in a ''more forum'' direction or a ''more social'' direction?
• will you ever take into consideration to eliminate downvotes? it's clear that the reddit effect is already here and people are not incentivized to read the article and comment on point or discuss less agreable stuff just because posts gets downvoted?
• if on my instance downvotes are deactivated, do they still influence my home when I browse subs from other instances that have downvotes?
• more UI mod tools! they are never enough because a community manager has not to be also a sysadmin or a linux poweruser just to take care of the community; stuff like subscribing to blocklists and allowlists, stuff like deleting cached media and so on
• how is the plugin stuff going?
• wouldn't it be better to drop the android client and the federated wiki to fully focus on making lemmy the best federated threadiverse software? now that nodebb has federation the competition is existent (mbin and piefed were never enough e.e) and other frontends are generally cooler (voyager basically brought me back on being active here)
• can we have a lemmy-first approach regarding comunication and contributions? basically i don't want to make a github account to push some opinions and it seems like they kinda get ignored when on the lemmy community about lemmy
• ability to merge communities having them mirrored in a basic way i guess it's already on his way
• would be cool to have tags/flairs but i understand that it is not easy (tags could also become a way to follow stuff on par with communities, with their pros and cons obv)
• would be cool to have lists to be able to browse lemmy from lemmy in a more rss way: for example there are communities i want to check once in a while but totally don't want em in my home and having lists would help
• changing ''favorite'' posts into ''bookmarks''/''saved''
• would be cool to have the possibility to have a favorite users list to check what your friends are up to
• any other suggestion would basically be ''can this thing that forums have also be ported to lemmy?'', i just think that lemmy has to evolve into a forum first with a link aggregator ui; it's kinda easy to use discourse as a bug tracker and feature request tracker for example (observation made because of the previous question of using lemmy instead of github for non code stuff)
• would be nice to have word filters and user notes
• also lobste.rs invite tree would be nice
• have you taken into account that maybe offering a service of lemmy hosting managed by you could help?
• dulcis in fundo, always about empowering non tech people, what about having lemmy on yunohost as one of the curated methods by the devs?

alright i think it's enough lol; now one very big appreciation: thank you for the rss first approach, having rss for basically everything like it was on reddit (well still miss some query rss but i understand it's harder to do) it's really so fucking useful and cool and i really hope that lemmy will make niche communities shine again

I would reply directly to that post, but it looks like the admin (who is also the Tesseract dev) has completely blocked federation with lemmy.ml by IP block or useragent block. So Im going to respond here to his complaints:

Lemmy didnt have a single breaking change since version 0.19 which was released 1 year and 4 months ago. And the breaking changes in that version were quite minor. Before that was 0.18, 1 year and 6 months earlier. That version only removed websockets, so most third-party app devs who used the HTTP API didnt notice any difference. Meaning the API has been almost unchanged for over three years which is quite long for a project that hasnt reached a stable version yet. 1.0 includes all the breaking changes that were held back over the years, so that we dont need any more breaking changes for a long time.

That said it would be great if we could keep backwards compatibility with the existing API in Lemmy 1.0. Problem is with all the major changes we are doing now, it would take a huge amount of work to implement this kind of backwards compatibility. If we had twice as many fulltime developers working on Lemmy this would be doable, but our resources are very limited so we have to make some compromises.