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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)
To respond to some of these:
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.
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.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
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.
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.
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.
Would need more specifics here, but we have a lot of search filters and capabilities.
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.