Let’s compose a list of the all shortcomings so that we can address them and eventually hit 100k mau.
If a post is deleted for any reason it nukes everything, even the comments.
I can’t go back and view any comments that I was replying to or that I had saved, I can only see my own comment.
It’s my own observation, but a lot of people on Lemmy are smug assholes, including many mods.
Yeah well that’s just, like, your opinion man.
When you block someone, all the subsequent comments made to that person’s comment are also unable to be viewed.
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.
This is comedy gold 🤣. Things get political so fast on here
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
To be fair it kinda is a bad part of even real world communities. Try going to a biker bar, animecon or any other community and saying “Gosh darn I don’t like ____”. Best case people would look at you funny and leave, worst - you getting a knuckle sandwich
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
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.
Not enough people around to discuss some more niche topics and hobbies.
Have you tried being more in to US Politics, Linux and Privacy? I’ve found several very vibrant communities for those here.
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.
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.
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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.)
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.
That it’s not well known.
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.
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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The politics is very left wing and very unwelcoming to any other viewpoint.
if a “viewpoint” is based on lies coming from a convicted felon rapist traitor to the country, than anyone holding that viewpoint can actually go fuck themselves
edit: as a reminder, we’re talking about people who cause and advocate for this
Staunch Obama and Biden supporter here … I’ve read Obama and Kamala’s most recent books…
You do not need to be a Trumpie to get annoyed with the “everything is emshittified”, “fuck capitalism”, etc posts and comments.
What a perfect example of what the top comment meant. “You either 100% agree with us or you are a trumpist/fascist/nazi”, no in-between, no nuance, no moderation allowed.
“You either 100% agree with us or you are a trumpist/fascist/nazi”
if someone’s voting for trump, then yea. that’s exactly what they are.
if you sit down to dinner with 8 people and one of them is a nazi, then you’re eating with 8 nazis
maybe trump voters don’t come to lemmy because they know they’ll get shat on. they’re free to make an instance of their own like hexbear and lemmygrad.
but the thing about trump voters is that you can’t have a rational discussion with them, because they throw everything they don’t like to hear out the window as “fake news”
so yea. they can still go fuck themselves
Not everyone who is right wing is voting for trump.
Are you seeing Lemmy being intolerant of all right wing discussion, or just Maga bullshit like sol is railing against
Anytime you mention anything right wing you get a lot of downvotes and a lot of railing against MAGA. It is almost enough to make me vote for Trump just out of spite. There might be a “silent majority” that doesn’t do that, but the evidence that anyone can see: comments and votes are clearly intolerant of all right wing discussion.
Just look at all the different replies I’ve got - most of them instead of looking at Lemmy in the mirror proved the point by jumping onto railing against MAGA.
To me, voting for Trump “out of spite” doesn’t sound like something a person would do if they cared about others. I hope you won’t do that.
I think the problem is more that maga has taken over the right wing, and instead of distancing themselves from maga, a lot of conservatives end up defending it. Which should not be tolerated imo.
If someone is intolerant of maga, what is so hard about saying “I don’t like them either”
oh that’s right-- conservatives also push for privatizing and deregulating everything, small government (except when it comes to gay marriage and gay books in the library), mandatory jesus for everyone, no taxes for billionaires, all the taxes for peasants, blaming all the world’s problems on mexicans-- what am i leaving out? oh yea, this
Let me head over to lemmy.ml and create a list of all the things the left wing stands for too. There is no particular agreement on any side on all issues. Governments have often done a poor job of what they should do, and when they do something you don’t get any options. There are many regulations causing more harm than good. And so on - there is plenty of observation and logic behind the various right wing positions - you don’t have to agree with them, but please start thinking about things from other points of view and understanding instead of attacking someone who makes one point on every possible thing you disagree with assuming they both support that other thing as well, and also that they are evil.
a vote for R is objectively the wrong vote
and very unwelcoming to any other viewpoint.
Thank you for providing a great example of this
i mean, top comment started with a criticism that generalized the entirety of lemmy, so i understood it to be a thing that was totally fine in this thread
Agreed, basically if you are moderate, you have to block 2 or 3 major instances to escape from extremist content. That’s very unwelcoming for new users.
Extremist…lol. Please continue to feel unwelcome.
I’m pretty sure Lemmy has a right wing bloc of instances.
Maybe but they are not in my feeds.
Hmmm interesting, I should search for them.
I could see libertarians starting up their own instances.
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.
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.
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
☺️
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.
