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)

It’s not really the previously banned users that are the problem. It’s that the real heart and soul of Lemmy is c/2real4meirl or whatever - ie, depression memes.

Reddit initially became popular because it was fun and interesting. Lemmy has picked up some of the old reddit crowd by being a bit more tech focused - but for the most point the links and comments posted are doom and gloom. Either AI is taking all our jobs, or its a huge scam. The world is run by evil capitalists who personally want you, in particular, to have a meaningless and miserable life. But don’t worry, because we, the proletariat, will overthrow them in a violent revolution… just as soon as we stop doom scrolling and crying in bed - haha, amiright guys?

Nothing about this is fun or interesting. It is bitter, angering, and depressing. That is what drives people away.

https://lemmy.world/comment/20046325

When you quote a block of text only the first paragraph gets quoted.

  • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    I don’t think any of this should be private. Allowing users to hide their profile creates conditions beneficial for astroturfing and for bots and trolls to obscure their history.

    • morrowind@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      Admins would still be able to see it. Mods can maybe see for their comm.

      This is the same argument used against all privacy. The EU wants to kill end to end encryption so they can catch bad actors. No thank you, I’d rather my messages were private and so was my lemmy profile.

      • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        Admins would still be able to see it. Mods can maybe see for their comm.

        Admins seeing it isn’t enough. A lot of the time admins and community mods rely on reports of user conduct, where people observe patterns and forward it on.

        Moderators also sometimes need to see those wider patterns of behaviour. An example here could be a music self-promoter sharing their song in a music community that does not allow self-promotion. If a moderator could only see posts by that user within communities they moderate, they wouldn’t know if they’re disingenuously self-promoting - in violation of the communities rules.

        This is the same argument used against all privacy. The EU wants to kill end to end encryption so they can catch bad actors. No thank you, I’d rather my messages were private and so was my lemmy profile.

        I don’t think governments, or all applications should be forced to be public so state entities can go through everything. I’m just saying that the public presence of all content is foundational to the concept of the Fediverse specifically and having it remain as a high-trust instance (or collection of instances). This isn’t Facebook. This isn’t a Discord chatroom. Or a WhatsApp chat. Private voting, private modlogs and private profiles long-term corrode trust in communities like reddit and lead to long-term damaging trends that degrade the quality of content.

        • morrowind@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          Yes I’m aware the design of the fediverse makes things public. You’ve made that point.

          I think hiding your profile is worth the moderation trouble. Users report individual posts, they’re very rarely going through a person’s profile.

          Mods banning based on activity in other places also leads to the opposite problem. Some subreddits do it and basically everyone hates it.

          • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            Yes I’m aware the design of the fediverse makes things public. You’ve made that point.

            Sorry, let me amend. Whether or not all of these things have to remain publicly visible based on ActivityPub, I don’t know - I’m just saying that I think its overall a good thing.

            I think hiding your profile is worth the moderation trouble. Users report individual posts, they’re very rarely going through a person’s profile.

            I don’t. And sometimes users identify patterns of behaviour, and as my example illustrated, sometimes you need wider context to evaluate whether or not a post is deceptive.

            Mods banning based on activity in other places also leads to the opposite problem. Some subreddits do it and basically everyone hates it.

            Those are usually done by autoban bots, which I very much oppose (and I don’t know if they could be blocked on the fediverse - but I am sure many instance owners would take a dim view of it, and suspect that the fact that the fediverse is a federated structure makes many community owners that might use them much less inclined to do so).

            And that can still happen anyway on Reddit even with profile concealment if those bots scrape specific subreddits for activity, rather than profiles.