Lemmy uses for its markup a language called “markdown”. It’s the same one used on Reddit, Stack Exchange, as well as in a modified form on Discord.

Markdown requires two line breaks to define a new paragraph to allow you to break your paragraphs across multiple lines, a useful ability to have with writing that’s going to be tracked by Git, or displayed on some old-school text editors. It also gives you the ability to separate between two paragraphs
and one paragraph with a line break in it.
Which is a useful thing to be able to do in some circumstances, like when writing poetry, or sharing your results in !dailygames@lemmy.zip. To enter a “line break”, end a line with two spaces and then press enter only once.

I dunno about Mastodon, but Pixelfed says they’re working on a “groups” feature which should be compatible with Lemmy communities. It’ll be interesting to see how they solve this issue—if they do address it at all.

Federation health monitor? Checks if posts are federating well

omg yes please. I dunno what’s going on with lemmy.world but it’s clearly not healthy right now and it’d be handy to have something to point to.

intercepts links to posts/comments and provides links to the local versions

90% of the time yes, please. But an easy way to override it is also very worth having, especially in cases where federation is having problems.

I don’t think your description of the problem is quite right, but I do believe that there is a problem. Here’s what I see on lemmy-ui:

It shows no thumbnail, but the standard “play” icon, centred.

That’s different from any other kind of post. Text posts:

Have no thumbnail, and a “text bubble” icon, centred.

Link posts:

Sometimes do, sometimes don’t have a thumbnail. If no thumbnail, they have an “external link” icon, centred. If there is a thumbnail, that same external link icon appears in the upper-right corner.

And finally, image posts:

Have a thumbnail of the image with an “image” icon in the top right.

In the case of image and video posts, clicking on the thumbnail/icon creates an “expando” where you can see the image/watch the video inline.

This is good UX, in my opinion. However, unfortunately, your instance is failing to load the video for me. It’s not caused by the expando, because this happens even if I go straight to the video itself in a new tab. So it’s probably a problem with the instance, not with Lemmy.

But as I said at the start, there is a problem here.

First and foremost, a complete lack of any thumbnail for the videos. Thumbnails are good! Videos should also get them.

And well-known popular video sites should also be supported by the video expando. From a UX perspective, it would be better to be able to watch YouTube directly inline, rather than being forced to go through to youtube.com.

Also as a second related UX issue, text posts can be viewed from the feed page, but unlike videos and images, it’s not done by clicking the thumbnail, but by clicking the little “+” sign next to the title. In my opinion this is inconsistent and not ideal.

Ah I see. Thanks for the clarification! That’s much less of a problem then. (Though still not ideal, since an instance admin might approve something for not violating instance rules, while it does violate specific community rules.)

Damn that’s very disappointing. It makes sense in some cases—if the local instance admin removes it, no reason for the community mod to ever see it. But if, say, a beehaw admin removes it after a bee reports it, a lemmy.world should still get to see the content in their queue to decide if they want to remove it, too.

Monospaced fonts outside of my IDE? Ugly, awkward to read, and just weird.

So if one of these groups has already actioned it, the post will still appear in the queue for the other groups to take a look at? I vaguely recall hearing about an issue where admins approving a comment would mean mods won’t get to see it, or vice versa. Is that me misreading/misremembering something, or has it since been fixed?

I’m guessing “target instance” here means both the host instance of the community and the instance of the user doing the reporting, which may be the same or may be two different instances?

omg I love your instance name. (But I hate that font :O)

But actually I think I did see that post, and the responses in it were probably part of what was bouncing around my brain that led me to ask this post. Because my main curiosity was less around who reports go to (I asked that to make sure I hadn’t missed something, more than for any other reason), but around what happens when reports are actioned by one of those groups, but not others.

They go to every party

Yeah I thought that was the case, and to be honest the main reason I asked this question was for the questions in the second paragraph around what happens when different types of users action the report.

But also, are the 4 groups I mentioned all correct? I didn’t miss one?

Could be. Though Lemmy could also use the title property (the one users see in their tab header) as a fallback option if it wanted to, or some other fallback.

I don’t have any specific technical knowledge of how Lemmy-UI does things, but I’m reasonably confident that it uses the og:title. This is a tag in the site’s metadata designed specifically to be the title that displays in places like Facebook and Twitter auto-generated thumbnails, and which is also used in things like Lemmy and Reddit which provide a “suggested title” to users.