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.
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.
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.
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Not enough people.
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People here are way bigger smug assholes than even Reddit.
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Sense of invulnerability and mod neglegence just because Lemmy is defederated. People naively think that makes it invulnerable to similar issues as Reddit (like toxicity/hivemind/bad modding.)
Back in 2023 I joined Lemmy because Reddit got rid of 3rd party apps. At first I was extremely impressed with the content here. While the community was small, meme channels were hilarious and had fantastic content. Same with the nsfw communities. However, now all the communities are filled with AI slop, political ragebait posting, onlyfans subsciption bait posts, and various other trash. So as far as I’m concerned Lemmy seems to be circling the drain. I can’t in good faith tell anyone I know to switch to Lemmy. If a friend were to ask me “hey man, how’s Lemmy?” My honest answer would be that it kinda fucking sucks.
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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.
Issues that would be solved by time/gaining more users
- Not nearly enough people to cover all the niche interest communities that Reddit does. At Reddit you find an expert on almost any topic to help you with your problems and you’ll find information on pretty much anything. Lemmy isn’t there yet.
- Not nearly enough history. A lot of content is still good and informative after many years. Lemmy doesn’t have a library of old-but-still-relevant content to search.
Issues independent of user count
- Search sucks. Reddit’s search does too, but reddit is easily searchable via Google. Lemmy isn’t.
- 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
Issues that get worse with more users
- Lemmy scales terribly. Every larger instance needs to retain a copy of pretty much all other content out there, and each comment/like/delete/update/… needs to be propagated to every other major instance out there. Adding more instances thus increases complexity and cost instead of decreasing it. Running a major lemmy instance is already prohibitively expensive now, with just about 50k daily active users. If Lemmy was to scale to Reddit numbers (500mio daily active users, roughly 10 000x the number of users), everything would just break down.
- Moderation work scales just as terribly. Not only does an admin need to make sure the communities on their instance are moderated, but they also need to moderate all other communities on all other instances.
- Related to the last point, there’s some legal issues as well if an admin doesn’t moderate all other instances. Since content is copied from other instances to your instance, illegal content (e.g. illegal pornography, copyrighted works, …) are also copied to your own server without your active participation. That makes it legally mandatory to moderate all other communities.
- Legal pitfalls in general. If lemmy becomes sizeable enough, all sorts of laws in regards to social media platforms will apply. That’s one thing if the social media platform is run by a huge corporation with a legal department, but it’s an entirely different story for a tiny group of non-profit idealists running the social media platform.
lemmy.ml and its admins being the developers at the same time.
Lemmy.ml needs to be defederated from all other instances. It’s literally an extremist instance of hate and bigotry.
I don’t think that in itself if the problem. anyone can host an instance. The problem is lemmy.ml being the apparent default instance, advertising itself as an instance for privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, and not mentioning seemingly anywhere in the description/rules that only red flavour authoritarian dogma is allowed in political discussion.
“America bad, therefore former ‘communist’ russia and current ‘communist’ china good.”
Edit: it’s not featured as prominently as it used to be on join-lemmy.org so things may be improving. they should still mention in the description that western viewpoints on many issues are not allowed due to “rule 1”
I realized .ml was fucking insane and delusional when they glorified Stalin and refused to recognize the atrocities he committed.
No matter what your political stance is, as soon as you deny negative facts and exclusively push the “positives” it becomes a problem and may radicalize you (if that isn’t already the case).
What happened to nuanced moderate politics? It seems people unconditionally put the “left” or “right” label on themselves. And ironically these blind followers will have the audacity to call anyone close to the political center, or people who are honest with themselves, cowards.
Yeah, well the guy who runs it is a notorious tankie.
You either tow the pro stalinist line or you are punished
I was on .ml first after leaving reddit, because I didn’t know this was the case, until I called out straight up state propaganda and defended capitalism with social and ethical policies once. You can imagine how they responded to that.
They certainly mislead me. My first year or so was on lemmy.ml @PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@lemmy.ml
After repeated bans i decided to move to a more relaxed instance. i still interact with lemmy.ml because some of the bigger open source communities are there, but .ml admins now cannot block me from accessing the full lemmyverse, only their diminishing corner of it
Same as with every other social media … the people.
I’m not your friend, buddy!
I’m not your buddy, guy!
Im not your guy, pal!
I’ll be your pal
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
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.
PieFed doesn’t have any of these issues
It does, since it still federates with lemmy.ml…
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.
Niche communities. Large spaces are built of small niche interest groups. The tooling around small spaces needs to be first class if we want the larger space to be healthy
Onboarding. I think it’ll be better if people promoted individual instances instead of Lemmy as a whole. As a whole, it seems vague.
Or if instances used the word “Lemmy” in their domain names. I can say “go to Lemmy.world or Lemmy.zip or Lemmy.cafe” but if I tell someone to go “sh.itjust.works” they will get confused and wonder why “that site is not Lemmy?”
I don’t think we want that. It sets some weird precedent that instances need to be lemmy-dot-something, which is both untrue and restrictive on server hosts as a barrier for entry if that becomes the universal convention.
I advocate the opposite. Because people then see “lemmy.world” and immediately associate it with the rumours about the devs being tankies even though .world and the lemmy devs are unrelated
Maybe. Some people might not even know what a tankie is until they start using Lemmy.
I didn’t. Tankie was a completely new word to me when I started here.
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.
This is how I see it too. Freedom from the toxic ad-supported business model is a slow-burning superpower.
It’s just as much a left-wing echo chamber as Truth Social is a right-wing one - and that’s a problem in both cases. Some might say it’s fine because we’re on the right side of history and they’re not, or something along those lines - but the people on Truth Social think the exact same thing. No one’s views ever change that way.
Some might say it’s fine because we’re on the right side of history and they’re not, or something along those lines
I say it’s fine because if there’s one thing I’ve learned repeatedly since about 2017, it’s that the single most effective thing I can do to reduce toxicity in my life is to reduce my interactions with conservative family members, coworkers, ‘friends’, and social media accounts.
It’s remarkably effective. I interact with no conservative or known trump voter more than work or family obligations require. Haven’t for years. Best mental health step I’ve taken in my adult life.
Not my fault they have all forgotten that “loudest asshole in the room” isn’t a personality.
I don’t think there is such a thing as a left wing echo chamber. We bicker incessantly. The other day I was making a joke at the expense of the car-brain mentality and someone came at me for ableism.
I’m not mad at them, it’s just illustrative of my point. We don’t take shit from each other, and we take each other to task over jokes. The right will, meanwhile, forgive literal pedophilia, rape, and murder of each other. I’m sure as hell not saying we should, but we will never create an echo chamber as good as they do because of that.
The right wing instances are just defederated from this larger federated group because the people on them were unable to follow the rules of other instances. Repeatedly, they would throw tantrums and create loads of dupe accounts to spam shit when people downvoted their shitty views or their accounts got banned. If they were capable of behaving with civility and following the rules, they’d still be here.
No idea how active that corner of the Lemmyverse is these days, but they have repeatedly chosen to behave in a way that leaves instance administrators with little choice other than defederation.
I think the main problem is that there isn’t much besides politics and memes. Most communities that aren’t politics seem to devolve into meme communities.
I feel like that’s an issue that’s exacerbated by the predominance of image posts over text posts, and text post only communities.
It’s probably an issue with vote-based discussions full stop. Post something funny and it’ll get votes because of the laughs; post something everyone in your echo-chamber agrees with and it’ll get votes because it’s right-on.
Maybe I just want to go back to forums.
Forums still exist, but I hard agree with you. I was so excited when the lemmy devs were considering hiding votes counts from the frontend by default. Unfortunately (imo) it got shot down by the community pretty quickly.
I think “likes” as a socials concept are part of a dark engagement pattern we’ve willfully brought over from the mainstream, and we won’t be able to be much better than them until we’re rid of it.
There is also a dearth of cannibalistic viewpoints here. And Zoroastrians are woefully underrepresented.
I don’t come here to change my views (though it happens from time to time), and neither do they. I’m not ignorant of their thoughts; I’m inundated with them every day. I don’t need to interact with assholes here. I don’t want to come here and watch people scream back and forth at each other, and I definitely am not interested in participating—there is a reason I’ve left other social media.
You don’t have to subscribe to political communities if you don’t want to see political discussion. But the dearth of genuine political discussion here is a problem for the people who do want it, that can’t be fixed by individual action.
What is genuine political discussion? How do you moderate it? Who is going to come when it’s moderated? How do you deal with both legitimate and legitimate complaints about biased moderation?
I just don’t think it’s a thing on social media. I think it can happen in private conversations, but as soon as it becomes more about winning an argument or posturing for readers, I think any hope of earnest discourse is lost. The more public a conversation, the worse it is. It’s like trying to argue with a bully in front of their friends. You might be able to reach the humanity in them, but not in that moment.
But the dearth of genuine political discussion here is a problem for the people who do want it
It’s not genuine if we don’t want to constantly have to expose ourselves to toxic bigots or “smooth” manipulators who think it’s not really toxic bigotry if they are “just asking questions?”
It’s not genuine if we don’t want to start every single discussion of something bad Trump did with rebutting a half dozen versions of “but whatabout that time when dems…”?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
I will not be shamed into allowing toxicity into my life, on social media or otherwise, in the name of “avoiding an echo chamber.” NOTHING is stopping a conservative from coming here and making cogent, factual arguments, aside from their own fragility.
The conservatives who “can’t” post to Lemmy are the ones who don’t know how to have an actual conversation and get banned. What fraction of conservatives that represents is an excercise left to the reader. But I’ve got my own opinion on that number for sure.
The problem is the right no longer argue their points in good faith.
“The right” consists of individuals, just like “the left” does - and there’s plenty of bad faith to be found on both sides.
“The right” consists of individuals,
Every last one of them who voted for trump has decided that bigotry (of multiple sorts) and steamrolling our constitution in the name of authoritarianism are somewhere between just what they wanted and not a dealbreaker.
What else do I need to know about them?
What else do I need to know about them?
That people identify on the political right outside of US as well?
Heh, I’m sure they are much better people than US conservatives, but I’ll quote myself from elsehwere.
The conservatives who “can’t” post to Lemmy are the ones who don’t know how to have an actual conversation and get banned. What fraction of conservatives that represents is an excercise left to the reader. But I’ve got my own opinion on that number for sure.
Maybe you should re-read my original comment? Because unless you think that Lemmy is not a left wing echo chamber then I have no clue what you’re arguing about here exactly.
Is this like plenty of fine people on both sides? In aggregate, one side is far more egregious and it’s not even close.
Speaking of bad faith…
Yes, and just like Trump, I’m not speaking of the white nationalists and nazies.
"So you know what, it’s fine. You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists – because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.
“Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people. But you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets, and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group.”
Uh huh, and I’m sure we can take him at his word. It’s not like he’s ever lied. He never gave a nod to nazis ever, like telling the proud boys to stand by. Yup, good old not racist donnie, I’m sure he totally hates white supremacists.
You wanna talk bad faith, believe anything that comes out of his orange piehole.
Misrepresenting what someone says is a textbook example of bad faith so doing that in a discussion about bad faith is ironic to say the least. What he actually thinks is unrelated to this discussion as it’s about what he said. You’d call people out for twisting your words so hold yourself to the same standards.
Thank god you can point to ONE SINGLE instance where Trump isn’t actively supporting white nationalist christofascism.
would you like to tell me which political side is currently putting people in concentration camps and starting a war
Agreed on all counts.
The real mystery to me is what value the echo-chamber residents get out of it. Why would someone join a group of people they already agree with, just to be told that their opinions are correct, and to shout down any interloper who contradict them? How is that not a boring waste of time? Is it that most people are insecure in their views and need validation, perhaps? It’s a phenomenon I still don’t understand.
People often accuse me of being a troll because I tend to voice views that are unpopular on this platform. Personally, I just don’t see any point in talking about things we all already agree on. I’d much rather try to change the views of those I disagree with - or have them try to change mine.
This exactly where I am on all counts. Stick with it!
I find I don’t agree with a lot of people, though there is at least a higher chance that someone, especially from my instance, will share my values and at least be willing to hear dissenting opinions without going right to insincere strawmaning.
To be clear, you join the echo chamber because you won’t be judged there and also because you want to dissent from its party line?
Yes, it’s a matter of gradation. It’s not an echo chamber for me because so many of you have different opinions, but generally we all care about what is true and the future of life on this planet.
So it’s easier to have discussions around the parts we disagree over.
generally we all care about what is true and the future of life on this planet
But (to stay true to the spirit of debate I just defended) is this not itself a straw man? Do you think, say, religious conservatives would say that they don’t “care about what is true and the future of life on this planet”?
Good question, and they might. In which case it would be easier to have a discussion with them.
However, I think much of the time they cleave to a more Kantian morality, where acting correctly / virtuously in accordance with an identifiable authority. They may also believe that the future of life on this planet is trivial when compared to quality of life on some metaphysical plane.
I have this discussion with my neighbour constantly who is nice, but she keeps saying I’ve “got to have faith” and that “they have a plan to fix all this when the time is right” all while real people are suffering and dying, and their suffering is indelible — it can never be made to have not happened — and they will never be coming back.
It’s really hard to have a real discussion about reality with someone like that.
Fair enough about
literal religious nutspeople of firmly held religious convictions. This side of the pond there are very few of those, fortunately. My basic point is that plenty of people who vote “wrong” (Trump, for example) would actually agree with you on most of your vision of the good society. The questions are mainly over how to get there. This IMO is the tragedy of democratic politics today, and specifically the USA. An almost absolute breakdown in communication.
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.
