1. 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.

  2. 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)

  3. 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)

  4. 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)

  5. Performance / reliability / scaling problems

    • “Slow and unreliable” is listed among cons. (Slant)
    • “Servers go down … syncing/federation issues.” (Android Authority)

  6. 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)

  7. Search and archive weak/incomplete

    • “Search sucks … Lemmy isn’t.” (szmer.info)
    • Lack of long-tail content archive.

  8. 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)
  • kersploosh@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    9 hours ago

    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.