What do you think is the biggest issue with Lemmy?
What do you think is the biggest issue with Lemmy?
What do you think is the biggest issue with Lemmy?
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.
This is exactly why I don't use Reddit on the side. When I run out of content on Lemmy, there's no choice but to do something productive instead. Had to go 100% cold turkey on Reddit to make that work though.
Exactly. I have a 1.5 hour daily time limit on Voyager, my Lemmy client, and I hit it every day, no problem. I do miss some of the niche subs but, every time I go back to ask a quick question, so many people are just so goddamned mean that I'm still very happy I left.
Summer was not meant for being productive.
slightly niche
Sports is like the most mainstream of interests, and lemmy still doesn't have a critical mass of sports discussion in general, much less specific sports/leagues, specific teams, specific games/matches, or specific players.
So I keep my reddit sports account.
I also keep an account for my local city subreddit, and one for my career field, because Lemmy doesn't have those either.
I'm the main poster on !football@sopuli.xyz. Most popular post on the planet.
I guess people on Lemmy just don't like sports.
Why not create a community? We even have a community to promote communities https://lemmy.ca/c/communitypromo and we have couple others too.
The lemmy.ml instance not being treated the same as the rest of the Triad in regards to defederation
Some highlights from the link:
"Don't worry guys, the Uyghur Genocide was REALLY just birth control! ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/30580167
"See! nobody died IN Tiananmen Square, just AROUND it, so it doesn't count!!" ~ Davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/30673342
.ml admin, Nutomics continued transphobia https://lemmy.world/post/29222558 ::: spoiler CW: Original transphobic Comment from Nutomic
:::"NK is actually good and anything counter to that is Western propaganda!" ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/31595035
General negative sentiment to other instances who haven't "seen the way" yet ~davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/27426510
"If you don't support Russia then you just don't understand geopolitics" ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/27352415
And a long list of bans/censorship and allowing the proliferation of known propaganda and misinformation outlets clearly demonstrating use of their instance and recognition to force a political narrative
I am currently working on a report on vote manipulation and the early results are showing clear signs of the some most prolific .ml accounts participating in brigading and vote manipulation.
that was so pervasive on reddit, you either get banned, or ended up arguing more and then get banned.
PieFed doesn't have any of these issues
It does, since it still federates with lemmy.ml...
i block the whole instance, so i dont have to deal with any of those posts, but the single .ml accounts can still be problematic.
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.
I think there is a feature request to allow communities to subscribe to other communities so that their posts and comments are synced.
Great, so the duplication happens automatically! This is solving the wrong problem, IMHO...
Duplicate communities posting the same content over and over again.
Piefed solves that issue: https://piefed.zip/post/100161
All comments from 5 crossposts in a single view
A few options
How many communities will die because lemm.ee is shutting down?
Active communities have moved elsewhere:
Inactive communities weren't active in the first place.
the architecture of lemmy, both socially and technically, is not working as hoped and it's likely it will suffer an effective death before it evolves sufficiently to enable distributed communities
the federated model is too lumpy and fragmented at the same time
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.
This is what the Piefed community migration system is designed to mitigate. It makes communities completely modular, allowing a community to move their entire posting history to another instance. As soon as it can pull subscribers automatically, it'll be as if nothing happened.
Lemmy uses ActivityPub, so that can't really be done in line with the spec.
The lack of content compared to reddit. If you look at !learn_programming@programming.dev for example, there is only one post this week, and 4 posts this month. How is it that, with all the web developers and AI vibe coding shit, no one is actually asking questions?
When I was on reddit, I had to hide posts because there were 10 or 20 interesting questions every day.
It's a negative feedback loop. There is a good chance programmers asking questions NEED the answer (homework, work-work) so they don't risk asking in low pop forums, making the forum low pop because there are no questions.
Mods seem inactive.
If people are interested in that topic (or any other), they can join !fedigrow@lemmy.zip. That community regroups people trying to grow communities, and the issues they face.
Yep, I had same reaction. Since there are so many tech nerds on here, as most early adopters are, I thought that community would have a lot more content. But I'll be adding to it soon enough since I just started to learn programming! :)
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
That's honestly not very helpful.
- Lemmy.world is too big
There are Lemmy-reasons for why that's a problem, but in any other context, the biggest is the best. And even in regards to lemmy, bigger instances have a higher chance to remain, to be decently moderated and to be decently stable. Before joining Lemmy.world, I was on Feddit.de, and we all know how that ended. And even before they vanished without a warning or an explanation, Feddit.de servers were always outdated, slow and unreliable, and moderation was arbitrary at best and non-existent at worst.
Lemmy.world is stable and works just as expected.
- Lemm.ee is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, something that is not very welcoming to new users (see this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28798607/15305964 )
That's a somewhat decent reasoning, though not immediately understandable as a new user. And not relevant anymore because Lemm.ee will shutdown within a week or so from now.
- sh.itjust.works names contains “shit”, which can deter users
Thanks, I'm adult enough to know whether I'm offended by the word "shit".
lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric feddit.org, is German-centric, but technically English speaking too programming.dev is topic-centric blahaj is queer-focused infosec.pub is topic-centric aussie.zone is country-centric midwest.social is region-centric
None of that really matters thanks to federation.
dbzer0 federates hexbear
Like Lemm.ee, apart from the fact that it still exists
beehaw is way outdated
That's some relevant reasoning.
sopuli.xyz (neutral name
See also:
discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name
Sopuli.xyz isn't any easier than discuss.tchnics.de, and jet discuss.tchnics.de was excluded for the name only.
While down in the comments it says
Sopuli doesn’t support gifs
Which is a really hard reason to avoid that instance, much more so than "has a difficult name". That's got much more practical implications.
But what's left regardless is: Even that link that is supposed to make instance selection easier isn't exactly easy to understand for a newcomer.
The same issue Bluesky and other app-killer platforms have/had at the start: momentum. Momentum explains everything else. If you leave out the vapid content on Reddit, it's still the premier place for asking questions and getting them answered by enthusiastic amateurs or actual experts in the field. The moment Lemmy gets the same quality tech support and DIY responses, it will have its place. Or, like with Bluesky, Reddit needs to become as alienating and disgusting as X became after the Elon takeover.
That's the beauty about Lemmy, it's not too reliant on momentum as it doesn't need graphs to go up at all times. The fediverse will always be a refuge when other platforms crumble. We'll just have to be patient and make sure the platform and the communities are as good as they can be at that point in time.
Reddit is useless for questions. If you're a subject-matter expert in something, find the subreddit for it and prepare to be horrified.
i usually search for what has been asked and answered, asking questions now in many subs, is only inviting trouble from gatekeepers, know it alls , and lastly astroturfing.
I had to give my friend this news some years ago, to no avail. Sooo many upvoted "answers" on Reddit are just confidantly incorrect BS. It's also trivial to find reddit answers from general search results instead of limiting your search to just Reddit.
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.
Yeah this is my issue with it. I can find all the arts, Linux, and political stuff just fine. Sports, music, and places communities are seriously lacking. They exist, but are a shell of what you'd hope they'd be. Engagement is so low, it's not worth bothering. The sports and music communities being so small and sparse is a real bummer.
Yeah the North Carolina community has 383 subscribers and the last post was 9 days ago.
Surprisingly better than I would have expected for a community about a state.
To be frank, in many cases communities were simply picked up by the wrong people who proceeded to not actively feed it with content. So they simply die.
The lack of continuous and backlogged content. For some this is a benefit because it gives them a reason to stop scrolling, but for others who come here to look for answers, find entertainment, or anonymously voice their opinions, this can be something of a downside.
Of course this platform is as anonymous as you make it, but I've seen some people say they refrain from commenting more often because they don't want to be known as a regular, instead wanting to "blend in to the crowd" as one would on more populous sites like Reddit or Twitter.
Niche communities. Also, attempts at niche communities getting dogpiled by everyone else (no, “this administration” really doesn’t have anything to do with the pedestrianisation of Norwich city centre.)
User volume and diversity is probably the main thing right now.
We just need more people posing shit, the fact that one or two users can dominate my feed if they choose to is not ideal. (Though often I appreciate the content anyway)
The diversity aspect is around how we have a lot of people in a small handful of demographics on here. It's getting better every day, but the thing that made Reddit great before they ruined it was everything you could think of had a community of people posing stuff about it, doesn't matter how niche.
One leads to the other though, more users naturally will mean increasingly diverse interests in our userbase.
It's about time Reddit fucked something else up anyway, it's been a few months
We just need more people posing shit, the fact that one or two users can dominate my feed if they choose to is not ideal.
That's because so many on Lemmy would rather downvote than post anything.
The tankies
I have trouble finding um what are they called here... Communities?... for the subjects I'm interested in. When I search, all I find is old posts or unrelated posts.
That's my biggest problem
FYI, your instance is shuttting down soon: https://lemm.ee/post/67603898
To find communities, !communitypromo@lemmy.ca is usually a good place
Oh, brilliant. Thanks.
My first try at the Fediverse, I didn't know how important it is to instance-hop so when mine was down a lot more often than it was up, I temporarily went back to Reddit.
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)?
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.)
This would probably quickly devolve into OP removing any comments they disagree with
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.
How do you determine if a threads an interpersonal question and post as opposed to a general topic-related post?
It’s too difficult to block huge swaths of things you’re not interested in. Like sports, or memes, or music. You block one community and 99 more about the same subject appear in your feed.
Adding some sort of Usenet-style organization or sublemmy tagging might help.
Piefed has a built-in keyword filter
A few options
Voyager just started supporting it today: https://lemmy.world/post/31839818
Repeated content. When I doomscroll I see the same posts I've already seen instead of less popular ones.
Some of the lemmy front ends have an option to hide posts you've already seen. I know connect does.
Make sure to sort your all feed by hot instead of active.
I'll try that, thanks!
Piefed solves that issue: https://piefed.zip/post/100161
All comments from 5 crossposts in a single view
A few options
Smaller user base. It is both good and bad but the community for my city is dead (probably there were only like 8 of us on here).
Am old enough to know from experience that the early people on any platform are the computer geeks so expect the tech communities to thrive first - but as someone else said, music communities die, sports, arts, things that are pretty widely popular. Honestly happy with the slow and steady growth of the !cocktails@lemmy.world so if it's an indicator, the general interest people are joining just not quickly but some must be sticking. I would guess at some point it will be perfect then too big but who knows?
Personally I also miss the nonsexual nudes threads like nakedprogress and normalnudes. Again that's a lack of users issue, you need a lot of people willing to post, to have even a few willing to post nude.
I was a very early reddit user and this just feels like Reddit twenty years ago
Lemmy devs - they are a curse and a blessing. A blessing that they worked on lemmy before reddit exodus. A curse as it's hard to contribute to the codebase and related components.
At least we have mbin and piefed to federate with.
Also in the 2 years since, the culture has shifted. There is less: "This is a new place. let's make it enjoyable for everyone" and more "I am right, everyone is wrong, and I will ruin your day", but that could be just my perception and not enough blocking.
"I am right, everyone is wrong, and I will ruin your day"
u/Ludrol
This WILL be the fate of EVERY alternative social media platform. Part of Fediverse or not. As all alternate social media platforms birth from some sort of protest/activism/boycott, the best example is how Shittit (Reddit) API changes gave birth to Shitmmy (Lemmy) and Deadbin (Mbin). Alternate platforms usually give space to de-platformed individuals. In the past Alt social medias gave space for the far right and alt-right, now it's far left and alt-left. Nothing different. Just look at what shitshow is going on in Shitsky (Bluesky) and Shitlight social (Skylight social)! Every post is "Orange man bad!", "MAGA Bad!". I gave Shitlight social a try and couldn't stand it! The folks there are chronically online and so deluded that they think everyone is MAGA, like there was a video where a young 11 year girl drove her parents car to the supermarket to buy something and crashed the car into the supermarket, the comments were like "The parents are Trump supporters!". I was like WTF! There was no media coverage of this incident (at the point when the video was made), the video was filmed by someone inside the supermarket, no other context, no nothing! And those deluded foids were screaming "Her parents are Trump supporters!" without even knowing the girl's name! To them everyone is a Trump supporter. Every alt media platform will become like this- filled with individuals on the extreme sides of the political spectrum. No alt media platform will reach mainstream status including the ones on Shitiverse (Fediverse).
The people on Lemmy are mostly weird obsessive leftists who have little interest in talking about anything else and disagree with each other for having nearly identical views in the grand scheme of things. I still like Lemmy but it can get tiring talking about anything especially if you mention something that people have decided is evil like AI.
not enough of my niche interests from reddit moved here. also the sports communities are a little bit like ghost towns
It's pretty much a symptom of having a small userbase. The most niche thing that can maintain activity isn't very niche yet. I hope and expect it will improve over time, and in the meanwhile I'd like to see the attitude to Reddit repost bots to soften.
Yeah same, the only solution is for you yourself to post in those niche communities more often, making them more active and thus more attractive for other users.
little bit like ghost towns
Welcome to my world! I try to post sports I watch on !sports@beehaw.org as much possible as I can. Same goes for !Football@sopuli.xyz and for !tennis@lemmy.world. Lately is more politics and memes.
Beehaw being defederated from LW and SJW prevents around 30% of the people on the platform of seeing that community. Have you considered maybe posting to a community on an instance that is more accessible?
Pleasantly surprised to see a football community that is actually about the game where you kick a ball with your foot.
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.
The tankies are far and away the largest problem. It's the number one reason why lemmy hasn't grown. Even when I signed up years ago from the reddit exodus every post I saw was heavily cautioned with "it's filled with tankies". And now every mention of it is being scrubbed for that reason. The second problem is the smaller size but see reason 1 for that.
Third problem is the sign up process being so excruciating. I understand it's to prevent bots but for every 2 bots it's preventing it's probably also preventing 1 actual user from signing up. I love this place despite the small size, because I can just sequester off all the tankies entirely on Connect, but if the creators don't realize they're actively standing in the way of growth by the actions they're taking and step away from all their moderation actions to focus on administration and development instead the outlook doesn't look too great.
I actually think Lemmy has grown. Although data on it hasn't been kept.
Tankies are ableist and don’t ever let them forget it
Piefed has a different dev team
Duplicated fragmentation
Piefed solves that issue: https://piefed.zip/post/100161
All comments from 5 crossposts in a single view
A few options
for me, no option to follow posts / comments, mostly to see new comments / replies and create proper aggregation of responses, any opinion dynamics and so on — this makes everything very temporary / short lived
Piefed allows to follow posts or comments.
https://piefed.zip/ is managed by the lemmy.zip team
Number of users. Takes a lot of users to keep all the small niche communities alive.
Political skew. You don't benefit from being in an echo chamber. It will also drive away people you don't agree with politically but do enjoy the same niche hobbies. Not sure about you but I'm much more interested in my hobbies than politics.
The default home feed: out of the box, it puts too much shit in the face of newcomers.
Once filtered out, it's great but one must first learn to filter the noise out which, I'm pretty sure, is dissuasive to a lot of non-geek users like myself.
PieFed's onboarding solves this
lack of communities, not found on lemmy, but is active on reddit. even some mirrors are rarely have new posts. more pros than cons though.
Communities are so easy to make on Reddit, I’ve looked into making one on Lemmy but I have no idea how to do it, it’s so much less accessible
It's easier to make a community here than on reddit, not to mention here its easier to moderate.
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I think this page might help, but remember some instances might restrict community creation, meaning that you have to speak with admin.
https://support.lemmy.world/quickstart/#creating-communities
The fact instances can be closed on users. I’m in EE I’m fairly new and now my instances will be closed, it’s pretty insane my content and account can be unilaterally destroyed by someone entirely out of my control
The smallness isn’t too bad if you hide read posts, hide posts you don’t care about and subscribe to a lot of different things but things showing up in my feed for days if I don’t hide them is obnoxious to me
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.
The backend is weirdly sluggish, and it's probably because of the database code.
The people that get their fee fees hurt from seeing opinions they disagree with, cf all the whinging abt tankies in the comments.
The negatives of a social site combined with the negatives of an unpopular social site.
Communities: People complaining about niche communities, yet they don't make or promote them. Create a community, promote it, share it with other users, share content.
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Politics: I came here to discuss about everything, but I only see new and dead communities, being overtaken and post daily politics.
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This is what I have blocked so far, yet more communities are being made, and one article goes on and on and on and on......
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https://piefed.ca/ has keyword filters. Those are pretty good to filter some of the political stuff.
It's complicated. I've been here about a year and I'm still not sure how to use it properly.
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.
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.
https://piefed.social/ hides the instance name of communities in the feed
UI/intercations not enough different from reddit, so doesn't make it popular
Moderators .
From what I've heard, some instances can be really slow or break often
Any talk of religion in a non-negative way and the pitchforks come out.
The irrationality and hyper emotional state of a lot of commenters. Not saying there isn’t due cause these days* but people GET. A. GRIP. and control yourself. You aren’t helping others or yourself with that behavior. It’s super immature.
*I’m not talking about being angry. I’m talking about how do I go on living emotional responses.
Same as with every other social media ... the people.
I'm not your friend, buddy!
I'm not your buddy, guy!
It's just as bad of an echo chamber as other sites. I have to actively "stop" browsing lemmy after a bit because I get annoyed at the repetitive nature of everything.
I've very much tried in the last few years to limit social media. I think it's been a benefit for me. I like social media, but having "stops" makes it more enjoyable and prevents the doom feelings.