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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)
This has been covered. This is a content-sharing network. Emphasis on both sharing and network. This means things that are posted are, by design, sent across the network. It’s not a walled garden; it’s the antithesis of a walled garden.
The only way for your posts to be seen by people on other websites is for those posts to be sent to those other websites, openly.
This isn’t a Lemmy issue, but the fact that it keeps coming up again and again framed as one is telling of the giant misconception people have about the Fediverse in general, and “Lemmy” in particular.
Lemmy is not a website. Or a space. It’s a website engine. Complaining about the quality or variety of content “on Lemmy” is like complaining about the content “on WordPress”.
The content that is here is actually almost magically discoverable, because that content likely didn’t start where you are, and website search bars only search their own databases. This is as true of lemmy.dbzer0.com as it is of Google itself. That’s why webspiders exist, to bring the content of the internet into Google’s database.
This is the nature of linking multiple different forum-based websites together. Some of them will have their own sub-forums for their own population to use that are similar to sub-forums on another website. Those two sub-forums may have similar, or even the same, name, but that doesn’t mean they should be treated as the same place by people outside of them.
The constant drive by people not using those sub-forums to consolidate said sub-forums, because of fucking aesthetics, is pretty directly disrespectful to the people using those sub-forums.
“Lemmy” is not a singular space. It’s a network of independent websites that have agreed to syndicate content. That means they are both in cooperation and competition with each other. Kicking and screaming that one or another should give up its own various cultures and nuances for the sake of some pan-fediverse whole is kind of a dick move.
It’s one thing if two websites just want to explicitly merge, but to just be like “why is there Burger King and McDonald’s on the same street? Everyone should just be in one burger joint!” is kinda entitled.
Reddit users complaining that things are different isn’t really good evidence of bad UX. At least the NodeBB discussion is getting close to the fundamental issue, but everyone seems to want the solution to it to be to force websites running Lemmy servers to act as dumb nodes in someone else’s project. And you’re not going to get too many hobby site owners signing up for that.
The solution is to highlight the independence of Fediverse websites, but then you get everyone whining about how small it is, how hard it is to find things, blah blah blah.
Search is actually pretty good, if you’re on a busy server. At least in my experience.
Archiving old content, though… That’s getting back into a whole “demand volunteers shoulder the responsibility for hosting other websites’ content indefinitely” thing.
And we’re back to “users aren’t talking about what I want to hear”, which… K.