Ask Lemmy

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.

The default home feed: out of the box, it puts too much shit in the face of newcomers.

Once filtered out, it's great but one must first learn to filter the noise out which, I'm pretty sure, is dissuasive to a lot of non-geek users like myself.

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.

Two different instance admins banned me from couple of community without telling me for which post or comment of mine were they banning me for, haven't responded when I asked them why, and because of that I can't see images posted by users from those instances.

Edit: This is what I see

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.

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

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

The tankies are far and away the largest problem. It's the number one reason why lemmy hasn't grown. Even when I signed up years ago from the reddit exodus every post I saw was heavily cautioned with "it's filled with tankies". And now every mention of it is being scrubbed for that reason. The second problem is the smaller size but see reason 1 for that.

Third problem is the sign up process being so excruciating. I understand it's to prevent bots but for every 2 bots it's preventing it's probably also preventing 1 actual user from signing up. I love this place despite the small size, because I can just sequester off all the tankies entirely on Connect, but if the creators don't realize they're actively standing in the way of growth by the actions they're taking and step away from all their moderation actions to focus on administration and development instead the outlook doesn't look too great.

I may not understand how all this works but the very first page is mostly stuff that is 24 hours old or older. Maybe I am sorting it wrong or something but looking for the latest news is not easy. There should be a way from things that are older than 24 hours to fall off the front page. Also something like reddit enhancement suite would be nice.

The negatives of a social site combined with the negatives of an unpopular social site.