Repeated content. When I doomscroll I see the same posts I've already seen instead of less popular ones.

not enough of my niche interests from reddit moved here. also the sports communities are a little bit like ghost towns

Some Communities are still controlled by people with absurd egos and overconfidence. Most of them hate people too, which is fun for a community manager.

I think it mirrors real life though, the type of people who want to be leaders tend to be assholes, and the ones who would be good at leading won't volunteer to do it.

Same as with every other social media ... the people.

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.

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.

lemmy.ml and its admins being the developers at the same time.

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.

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

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

the population is 99% children. Dumb, reactionary etc.

some of them are moderators

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.
Politics: I came here to discuss about everything, but I only see new and dead communities, being overtaken and post daily politics.
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......

Onboarding. I think it'll be better if people promoted individual instances instead of Lemmy as a whole. As a whole, it seems vague.

The tankies

The lack of content compared to reddit. If you look at [email protected] 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.

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

The backend is weirdly sluggish, and it's probably because of the database code.

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.

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 (aka, the potentially deal-breaking issues)

• 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 monthly active users. If Lemmy was to scale to Reddit numbers (1.1 billion monthly active users, roughly 22 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.

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

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 [email protected] 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.

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.

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.