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Lack of granular privacy / profile control
- “The lack of privacy controls … our profiles are public, and all our posts and comments are visible to anyone.” (lemmy.toot.pt)
- Users cannot choose who sees their profile history, comments, or posts.
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Poor content discovery / lack of niche communities / limited diversity
- “The platform lacks all the communities … There are no communities for games or music or sports or hobbies or movies or anything.” (Reddit)
- “Not nearly enough people to cover all the niche interest communities that Reddit does.” (szmer.info)
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Fragmentation across instances / duplication of communities
- “Multiple communities dedicated to the same thing across multiple instances … causes confusion …” (Popcar’s Blog)
- “There are duplicate communities: every instance seems to have their own version of each community.” (Reddit)
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Bad User Experience (UX) / usability issues
- “Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.” (NodeBB Community)
- “Simply using them is confusing … accessing remote subs is a complete train wreck.” (Reddit)
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Performance / reliability / scaling problems
- “Slow and unreliable” is listed among cons. (Slant)
- “Servers go down … syncing/federation issues.” (Android Authority)
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Moderation, safety tools, and content-quality issues
- “Moderation tooling is not adequate for removing illegal content from servers.” (We Distribute)
- Users report low content quality (memes, shitposts, agenda memes) instead of high-value discussions: > “The politics is always … or it’s toxic American hyper-partisan … The memes aren’t any better.” (Reddit)
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Search and archive weak/incomplete
- “Search sucks … Lemmy isn’t.” (szmer.info)
- Lack of long-tail content archive.
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Over-representation of particular content types (US-news, memes, agenda posts) and low content-quality
- Users note: heavy US-centric news, lots of meme posts, little local news/events or regional content.
- While I didn’t find direct sources for exactly “too much US news / no local events”, the broader complaint of “lack of niche interest/hobby/sports” covers this. (Reddit)
It’s not really the previously banned users that are the problem. It’s that the real heart and soul of Lemmy is c/2real4meirl or whatever - ie, depression memes.
Reddit initially became popular because it was fun and interesting. Lemmy has picked up some of the old reddit crowd by being a bit more tech focused - but for the most point the links and comments posted are doom and gloom. Either AI is taking all our jobs, or its a huge scam. The world is run by evil capitalists who personally want you, in particular, to have a meaningless and miserable life. But don’t worry, because we, the proletariat, will overthrow them in a violent revolution… just as soon as we stop doom scrolling and crying in bed - haha, amiright guys?
Nothing about this is fun or interesting. It is bitter, angering, and depressing. That is what drives people away.
https://lemmy.world/comment/20046325
When you quote a block of text only the first paragraph gets quoted.
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Privacy is antithetical to ActivityPub federated networks. Everything on Lemmy, Mastodon, Pifed, PeerTube, etc is absolutely public. There is no way to prevent people from seeing anything to post to any of these services.
Real privacy needs to be a built in function from the very beginning. It’s not really possible within ActivityPub.
Everyone needs to understand this. There is no privacy here. There won’t be, because there can’t be. That’s the way it is.
There’s a difference between full guaranteed privacy that not even the NSA could get past and showing your post history by default in a nice UI for everyone to browse
Yes. The later makes very clear to everyone, they don’t have any privacy here.
My point is, that’s a good thing.Why does it have to be all or nothing? Why can’t I have some casual privacy, to stop every idiot from gawking at my post history?
If you want people to know, just put a big banner there “YOUR POST HISTORY IS NOT FULLY PRIVATE”
Because people don’t pay attention to signs.
You knowing people can easily see everything you’ve posted, effects your behavior here, far more than any banner you’d also complain about having to click past every time.Then too bad? Why should my privacy be compromised because other people don’t pay attention.
Also you don’t have to click past it, I was just suggesting a static banner on the profile page, or next to the setting where’d you’d turn it off
Your privacy is compromised eithor way. That’s the point. You just don’t want it to be so obvious. Like putting a spare key under the welcome mat at your door, that’s a bad idea.
It’s better than leaving the door unlocked
What you call “fragmentation” is perhaps better described as “multiple moderation philosophies applied to the same topic” and is actually a fundamental aspect of the ActivityPub protocol, which was designed above all else to create platforms that resist centralization.
I’m not saying you’re wrong to dislike it, but it is definitionally impossible to have both decentralization and centralization at the same time.
To respond to some of these:
Lack of granular privacy / profile control
Fair, but also lemmy isn’t trying to be a facebook-style social network, but a reddit alternative. So the main action isn’t really following people, but following communities. GNU social and others probably do granularity and limited sharing better.
Poor content discovery / lack of niche communities / limited diversity
There are a few external tools to help with this, but @Nutomic also built in a feature for new instances to pull various popular communities, that will be in lemmy
1.0. This should help with some content and communities being on new instances.Fragmentation across instances / duplication of communities
This is a feature, not a bug. Many communities run by different people, with different userbases, is a good thing. !news@startrek.com is going to be different from !news@starwars.com and !news@ghana.com
Bad User Experience (UX) / usability issues
There are like 10 different open source apps for lemmy, on every platform, with completely different UIs and experiences. This is a far better ecosystem than anything else I can think of (especially reddit), and if someone has problems with UIs on any of them, they can contribute.
Performance / reliability / scaling problems
Will always be an issue that needs work, but lemmy has scaled up to support ~40k active monthly users without too many issues. Most of our problems are database, not network related. Both problems can be solved solely by development resources.
Moderation, safety tools, and content-quality issues
Mods can remove all content at the click of a button, and users can report items. I’d need specifics on other things that are missing.
Search and archive weak/incomplete
Would need more specifics here, but we have a lot of search filters and capabilities.
Over-representation of particular content types (US-news, memes, agenda posts) and low content-quality
Somewhat unavoidable on anglo-net, and especially when people are drawing in large numbers of users from reddit, which suffers from that above. Also there are some servers that do no moderation on US content, and let it overrun every single community. Here we try to keep it on /c/usa unless it affects the greater world, and we also try to remove low-quality drumpf says type-memes that overrun reddit.
I never get the duplicate communities complaint. Just about every topic has at least three communities on Reddit.
Most of these just seem to be features of decentralisation. And if decentralisation isn’t your thing, neither is Lemmy honestly. Just stick to Reddit.
I really think Fediverse shouldn’t be thought of as an alternative to proprietary social media that any average user can just switch to. There’s a completely different mindset behind it, where you’re not a passive consumer but a creator and a developper, responsible for the growth of the project the same way its original creators are. Same thing as with Windows and Linux.
Pure comedy 🤣🤣🤣 I wonder if there’re people like that who use Linux
What so anyone who doesn’t have a particular interest in decentralization should just leave? That’s a great way to lose 98% of your userbase
I don’t think they were saying users need to have an interest in decentralisation, more that some of these complaints seem specifically like problems with a very core principle of Lemmy (decentralisation), and that disliking a fundamental and (as far as I’m aware) unchangeable aspect of a platform might mean the platform isn’t a good fit for those users.
For 8, people should use Piefed and its built-in keyboard filters.
For 3, people should use Piefed and its comments consolidation for crossposts.
I’m also archiving this topic as you’ll probably delete it soon.
1: @Skavau@piefed.social is right.
2, 7, 8: What’s the goal here? Is Reddit the gold standard we’re aiming for? I’m not convinced Lemmy needs millions of daily active users to keep a plethora of niche communities active, and to store a massive backlog for posterity. It’s fine if Lemmy is smaller and narrower in scope.
3: Reddit has duplicate/overlapping communities, too. I’m not sure how to avoid this without either (a) top-down control of community creation by admins, or (b) constant pruning of communities by admins. Neither are desirable, IMO.
4, 5, somewhat 7: Adjust expectations to reality, and appreciate what we have. Lemmy isn’t Reddit 2.0 and it never will be. There isn’t big venture capital money sloshing around. But Lemmy has come along way without it. Hundreds of instances hum along reliably, day-in and day-out. There are surprisingly good browser UI’s (look at Photon/Tesseract/Alexandrite) mobile apps. Not bad for an open-source project that runs on volunteer time and user donations!
6: The complaint about moderation tools is legit. I really want a better reports queue, among other things. But I don’t have the time and energy to contribute code, so I wait patiently.
