Let’s compose a list of the all shortcomings so that we can address them and eventually hit 100k mau.
Not enough video game communities. I think that was a huge part of Reddits initial success. Even to this day I still search “Problem + /reddit” on google whenever I have issues in a game. Reddit often holds the core community off a video game. It’s often detrimental to a games success to have a Reddit community. Lemmy has communities for some games, but they are mostly inactive or have only 10-60 users. So don’t even have the latest patch notes posted.
As a non-US user myself, beside the lack of participation on Lemmy, I think the kind of replies and the instant escalation to this comment, in this very thread is a great example of why Lemmy can suck, hard.
The world, exactly like the Internet, does not end at the US borders.
And yep, even though many US citizens seem to be on the verge of slicing each other throats, it doesn’t mean the rest of the world should behave the same. Lemmy users should still be able to discuss freely even between people of varying opinions, or even of completely opposite opinions.
It’s funny, cuz i remember tons of responses like that when i used Reddit, too. But the onslaught was often worse cuz the larger user base had more power to bombard you with insults about how wrong you are, and give you 49 downvotes in 10 minutes just cuz you give some criticisms about a popular game you didn’t happen to enjoy and forgot to add reluctant praise to (“i recognize it’s a great game and well made, but its just not for me sad face.”)
I think this is just a bad part of the internet, in general. Similar things would even happen in AOL chatrooms if someone voiced a disliked opinion, I remember Diamond chat would get crazy
As a US user, with a bit of an organization compulsion, I do wish it was a little more structured.
The problem is not that community x is us-centric, but that it’s not called x.us
That it’s not well known.
Its always about one of two things:
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Instances going down forever. - kbin, even though its not lemmy, had a more appealing UI to me and my little brother. We’re on fedia now, but I only really use it to lurk when Lemmy.world won’t load randomly. I don’t think he even uses it at all anymore.
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De-federation. - Beehaw caused several other people I know IRL to go back to reddit within a week. The timing was so perfect to wreck the API boycott that I’m almost convinced the Beehaw mods work for reddit. “Everything was broken” and now lemmy is dead and gone forever in their eyes, some even assuming the whole thing is literally gone now. They’re not willing to try again.
Nah, I have a different gripe:
When the reddit exodus happened, Lemmy was flooded with copycat communities for every popular subreddit. That’s fine with me. But what’s not fine is that very few of these communities use the same posting rules (if any at all) so they’re homogenized. Like what is the difference between nostupidquestions and asklemmy?
I have another one that’s not specific to Lemmy but absolutely applies: meme “communities” where it’s all reposted content. I used community in quotes because these communities/subreddits/Instagram accounts are just…meme archives. You’ll find the same shit in every single meme archive on the internet. It feels like it’s less about sharing and more about having the biggest bucket.
Reddit means pointless or stupid repetition (I forget which). I guess that whole homogenized thing is baked in if they were to migrate.
As much as I hate what reddit has become, it was a LOT less of a problem over there. And despite its reputation for having power tripping mods, the communities with strictest rules were almost always the best ones
A well-moderated community is a good community online. Self policing doesn’t work when it’s thousands of strangers
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Finding instances for sure. Just learned in this thread that sorting by ‘all’ doesn’t show me every instance
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Here are some great instance discovery resources:
Yes thank you, I’m aware of those. :) I meant via your own instance. I’m registered on a very small instance, and being able to discover other instances from your own would make it much more usable.
…Unless that is already possible. Lemmy isn’t that intuitive, at least for me
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Not enough people around to discuss some more niche topics and hobbies.
I keep hearing this. And I get it. But I think as a community our interests are so niche that we also miss out on more mainstream content I would like to see. For example there’s some prime time network TV shows I watch, there’s comms for them with subscribers but they are not active.
Sure. This wasn’t meant to take away from anything else. I think at least theoretically, both can go along. It’s just that it’s more obvious with the niche things. But probably applies to all of the topics. And there is a demand to discuss all kinds of things and I think we have the potential to let the user decide what they’re interested in… Whether that’s popular/mainstream or not. It just takes people to talk to to be present… somehow.
Oh I am absolutely not saying you are wrong. I completely agree with you. I’m just saying while there is a lack of niche content there is also a lack of mainstream content. Which might sound contradictory, but I think both can be true at the same time.
Specific video game subs are what I miss the most. I used to be very active in r/stalker and r/teslore, r/trueSTL. There is nothing like that here that sees more than one post per month, and I’m not sure that I have the energy to commit to reviving it myself.
Same, same. I miss hobby electronics projects. And some of the communities about AI topics (and more detailed descussion than just the hype) really lost momentum.
Too much focus on discussing the news and politics. And rarely is it an inspiring and new perspective. (Sometimes it is, though.)
this election is among the most important ones in the history of the country. if not the most. i am also looking forward to it just being fucking done with and having other things on the feed
One thing I’ve learned is that voting is a lot like breathing.
Every time you do it, it’s the most important one of your life time.
I remember 2008. McCain vs Obama. I preferred Obama but honestly I wouldn’t have minded too much if McCain won, it was just Sarah Palin that was crazy.
Contrast that with Jan 6th, 2021. The loser of the election incited a riot and attack on the US capitol and democracy. This individual is running again.
I hope it turns out well for the people living in the country. We’re going to find out soon…
either way there will be violence. the question is how long the violence goes on
I don’t live there, so it’s kind of none of my business… I just always hope people don’t need to reach rock bottom to find out what’s important and how to proceed…
I recall another thread a few weeks ago where someone suggested a no political discussion day, and everyone down-voted him and gave them angry responses. I recall one up-voted response saying “everything is political”.
This place has become an echo chamber for cranky old Linux users and is really uninviting to anyone else.
One of the things I miss about Reddit is the diversity of opinions and viewpoints on the platform. (I didn’t love the insane amount of reposts and bot traffic)
Hehe, btw, I’m one of the cranky Linux users slowly growing old…
I can tell you this isn’t really an echo chamber for people like me. I’d say the majority of people here are more “normal” people. My take on things often gets opposed. And it feels quite different to the old school places where Linux users and admins mingle. Often times the mob mentality (if there is underneath a post) is against me. A Linux forum feels very different. Especially the way they talk to each other. Here, people argue about opinions, while the “proper” nerds discuss technical facts and then something is objectively right or wrong (or solves something). Which I don’t see happening here that often. So I’d say it’s not it.
You’re right. Everything is kind of political. And arguing about politic sometimes is stupid and tiresome. And I also like diversity of perspectives and opinions. I wouldn’t need to talk to other people if I wasn’t interested to hear what they got to say…
(And the downvoting here is just silly. I also think it’s way more pronounced than on Reddit. I regularly see urban legends getting upvoted. While nuanced and longer perspectives get punished. And being human surely includes ignorance. It just doesn’t help anything once it gets part of the dynamics.)
Ha that was my shower thought post. I was not expecting to be hated on so much for a little idea.
At least I feel like I’m heard here. I posted comments so many times on Reddit and I rarely get any engagement. It feels like talking to yourself among an absurdly large and loud crowd.
Politics is big on instances like ‘world’ (which, despite the name, seems very US-centric), but others I have an account on its less of a thing.
I have a mostly politics free feed that I’ve cultivated. Some always leaks in here and there, but if it’s an account that only posts that kind of content I just block them.
I definitely can see how relentless the politics posting is when I go to all, though.
The fact that many on the internet haven’t gotten past the largest hurdle, creating a Lemmy account.
We’re currently at 462k created accounts.
I said this a while ago on another thread, but if I was a Dev on the project I would be working to create a website that automatically signs you up for an instance. The high level concept is instances would opt into this pool, the user would simply put in their username like any regular website, and then the system would create them an account on whichever instance was best for them (maybe based on ping/trying to spread population around).
This would majorly reduce the barrier to entry in my opinion, because a lot of people just want to browse, and don’t care about the federation aspect at all.
Isn’t it always that >95% of users are lurkers? I don’t bother logging in most of the time, I just go to lemmy.world or something and sort by all
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This one is my biggest challenge too… I wish there was, like, a “trial” instance that folks were automatically signed up for and then after 30 days they had to switch and find another instance.
Once you’re in the door it’s lovely, but that first barrier to entry scares people off.
It’s too fractured, posts in one community on one instance have separate comments and interaction to the same post in the same community on another instance, even if you use crossposts properly, and it clutters up your feed with multiple of the same post
Reddit has the same issue. People will post an article in like 6, somewhat related subreddits and the feed would be quite repetitive.
…is it weird that I actually like this part of it? It feels like it allows there to be different “flavors” of communities, and I can decide which flavor I like and which one I don’t.
I can see how it would get frustrating as a poster trying to figure out which community will get the most reach.
I don’t think it’s weird. Right now it probably isn’t great cause the pool of commenters is already small, and this dilutes it further, but I think in a world where we had plenty of people in all those communities it would be fine.
It does suck on the posting aide, though, and it also seems like there might be some use to a tool/feature that merges them somehow so you’re viewing it all together and respond to whoever you like in one place.
This is a big one. Its probably doomed to imperfection and hold out Mods who don’t want to do it but I think some kind of Community Sync option would be huge.
What the hell I didn’t even know this existed. I just chose all posts and thought I was seeing the aggregate content from every instance. Also, Seeing the usernames (with different instances on it), it made me believe everyone’s interactions are saved and visible.
Posts within the same community are synced and you can see communities from different instances. The point is that news@instance1 and news@instance2 are different communities even though the names are similar.
The counter argument is that reddit has the same problem even without federation. /r/games, /r/gaming and /r/gamers are three different subreddits with very similar names and you have no way of knowing which one is the “main” gaming community unless you check each of them. With time, this will probably sort itself out with lemmy as well. It just takes time for one of the similar communities to become the de facto standard.
Too many terrorist simps, too much mod abuse, too much disinformation, too many Tankies, discovery of communities is hard with how federation works and kinda requires third party apps.
That talklittle went to tildes instead, which, fair.
Generally mods of the communities still suck to an absolute extent, not as bad as reddit but still nowhere near acceptable.
I hate not being informed of bans, and I think they are all permanent.
They’re not all permanent, Lemmy displays the duration in the mod log. I agree that there should be some kind of notification though.
Gosh the permanent bans being handed out like candy to someone being rude is often too much.
Many instances have domain names that look invalid and/or like scam sites to non-techies. Dot world? Dot social? Dot [obscure country TLD]? There’s also no guarantees that the domain will indicate that it’s a Lemmy site. Both of these become problematic with sharing, as the default (? been a while since I’ve used the web interface) share function links to the poster’s instance and not the community instance. A year and a half ago, the shared links section in my messenger was mostly a Reddit flood. Today, it looks like someone spilled alphabet soup.
Just today I was about to share a link and the URL was like “shit just works” and I was like damn, fuck that, I can’t share this shit. Not even joking
When they post asking for help with Windows and get an entire thread of answers from obnoxious elitist wankers who couldn’t even decide on a distro between them
The default web interface is very poorly designed and looks uninviting. Sure, there are great alternative interfaces but people will be turned off before they could check them out. Also, it’s usually the first thing you see when someone’s sharing a link.
There not being an official app is also something that will confuse non-tech users.
The default web interface is very poorly designed and looks uninviting.
A redesign is on the way. It will use Leptos with DaisyUI.
There not being an official app is also something that will confuse non-tech users.
Jerboa is official.
Is Jerboa official? I used it at the start but it seemed to just stop getting developed. Myself and plenty of others have since moved on to other 3rd party apps. I’m using Voyager now.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/jerboa?tab=readme-ov-file#support--donate
“Jerboa is made by Lemmy’s developers”
The default web interface is very poorly designed and looks uninviting.
Disagree. I find it rather clean and functional, even on mobile. Maybe because I liked old reddit. Maybe younger people are used to Instagram-like feeds so they don’t like the compact forum style.
I thought Jerboa was the official app.
Indeed an official app would ease the user on-boarding.
I had to read through some articles first to get the concept of the fediverse first and the look out for my home instance. That’s way too techy
We need a guide to send perspective users to signup through Lemm.ee and voyager to onboard them.
Original content could entice them to more willingly join Lemmy.
