Duplicated fragmentation

I may not understand how all this works but the very first page is mostly stuff that is 24 hours old or older. Maybe I am sorting it wrong or something but looking for the latest news is not easy. There should be a way from things that are older than 24 hours to fall off the front page. Also something like reddit enhancement suite would be nice.

As everyone has pointed out, people and content. Its good in some ways since not every post is drowned out with one thousand replies nobody will ever see, but at the same time, you’re not getting much of anything at all sometimes. Not even very niche ones either. Even groups that represent entire states has limited info or replies still. If it can grow to that size and see some more unique and local content more I think even that would be a much better place for it to be.

Not enough people for even slightly niche communities. Wanna talk about smash brothers ? 732 people, only 2 posts in the last month.

This is why people still use reddit on the side.

Not just Lemmy, but all Fediverse frontends: it’s confusing and cumbersome. I’ve been here for 2 years and I still find that it’s very much lacking in the “user experience” department. I have add-ons and scripts to ‘patch’ things that ought not to need patching. I don’t know if it’s possible for this to happen given the nature of Fedi, but it should be the case that a new user would find it works more or less the same as non-Fedi software and not have to juggle instances and type hideous and long URLs into the search bar. Instance names and stuff like that should be available to people who want to see them, but by default there’s little reason to frighten new users with it. Make it be under-the-hood type stuff. One follow button that works for your home instance regardless of where you are on the Fediverse would be a nice start.

Also, privacy needs to be handled better. Again, not sure if that’s possible because of the nature of Fedi, but Lemmy should make users feel more secure than reddit or Twitter, not less. Like, it’s bizarre that reddit protects my privacy more than Lemmy does, given that reddit doesn’t really protect my privacy much at all.

Duplicate communities posting the same content over and over again.

Communities are tied to an instance. How many communities will die because lemm.ee is shutting down? There is a slightly mad rush to migrate communities already.

Lemmy should have used usent style naming for communities.

We need more users, to do that we need more advertising.

I was waiting to leave reddit for like a year before i found out about lemmy.

There’s no way the twitter clone Bluesky should have absorbed the fleeing reddit users instead of this space that functions just like reddit.

It’s complicated. I’ve been here about a year and I’m still not sure how to use it properly.

Trying to be a Reddit clone.

Reddit was shit to begin with. It was a dumbed down forum site for people who found sites like Plastic or Kuro5hin too intimidating or complicated(!).

Slashdot-style upvoting would instantly solve a lot of “Reddit”-type problems, because instead of just good/bad, or like/dislike, the reason for the vote is noted, such as “insightful”, “funny”, etc., and you can then filter and sort comments much easier. Just filtering out “funny” comments saved soooooooo much time.

Another thing: Why don’t creators of threads have the option to admin their own threads? It’s their thread! It wouldn’t be appropriate for discussion threads (for obvious reasons), but for interpersonal posts and questions, it makes perfect sense for the creator to be able to have control over what appears in the thread to keep it on topic and the trolls at bay. It’s pretty rare to see a post where someone asks a question that doesn’t quickly devolve into an offtopic mess, and the creator is usually attacked for trying to bring it back on topic. This has made Reddit useless for question-answering (and besides, the most upvoted answer is almost always wrong.)

Is the purpose of these forums to enable authentic conversation, or just to farm content regardless of quality (to be sold to AI companies, presumably)?

Lemmy was architected by people whose philosophical intentions are out of alignment with the software they cloned.

That system was designed to invite as many idiots as possible, to bait as much engagement as possible, with virtually no controls on quality or intelligence.

Well congratulations Lemmy, you’ve made the next Reddit. There’s no reason to be here, it’s just a pile of morons for the most part.

Issues that would be solved by time/gaining more users

• Not nearly enough people to cover all the niche interest communities that Reddit does. At Reddit you find an expert on almost any topic to help you with your problems and you’ll find information on pretty much anything. Lemmy isn’t there yet.
• Not nearly enough history. A lot of content is still good and informative after many years. Lemmy doesn’t have a library of old-but-still-relevant content to search.

Issues independent of user count

• Search sucks. Reddit’s search does too, but reddit is easily searchable via Google. Lemmy isn’t.
• Onboarding is difficult, because you have to choose an instance, which is hugely important, but a newcomer has no idea what makes/is a good community to join

Issues that get worse with more users (aka, the potentially deal-breaking issues)

• Lemmy scales terribly. Every larger instance needs to retain a copy of pretty much all other content out there, and each comment/like/delete/update/… needs to be propagated to every other major instance out there. Adding more instances thus increases complexity and cost instead of decreasing it. Running a major lemmy instance is already prohibitively expensive now, with just about 50k monthly active users. If Lemmy was to scale to Reddit numbers (1.1 billion monthly active users, roughly 22 000x the number of users), everything would just break down.
• Moderation work scales just as terribly. Not only does an admin need to make sure the communities on their instance are moderated, but they also need to moderate all other communities on all other instances.
• Related to the last point, there’s some legal issues as well if an admin doesn’t moderate all other instances. Since content is copied from other instances to your instance, illegal content (e.g. illegal pornography, copyrighted works, …) are also copied to your own server without your active participation. That makes it legally mandatory to moderate all other communities.
• Legal pitfalls in general. If lemmy becomes sizeable enough, all sorts of laws in regards to social media platforms will apply. That’s one thing if the social media platform is run by a huge corporation with a legal department, but it’s an entirely different story for a tiny group of non-profit idealists running the social media platform.

deleted by creator

1. Not enough people.

2. People here are way bigger smug assholes than even Reddit.

3. Sense of invulnerability and mod neglegence just because Lemmy is defederated. People naively think that makes it invulnerable to similar issues as Reddit (like toxicity/hivemind/bad modding.)

Back in 2023 I joined Lemmy because Reddit got rid of 3rd party apps. At first I was extremely impressed with the content here. While the community was small, meme channels were hilarious and had fantastic content. Same with the nsfw communities. However, now all the communities are filled with AI slop, political ragebait posting, onlyfans subsciption bait posts, and various other trash. So as far as I’m concerned Lemmy seems to be circling the drain. I can’t in good faith tell anyone I know to switch to Lemmy. If a friend were to ask me “hey man, how’s Lemmy?” My honest answer would be that it kinda fucking sucks.

lemmy.ml and its admins being the developers at the same time.

Same as with every other social media … the people.