Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
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This may be something you don't want to hear so please bear with me. I've been here since the reddit drama started.
There isn't much engagement here. If you compare a post here to a post on reddit, there will be zero comments here and 100 to 1000+ on reddit.
Another issue is each instance has its own version of the same community. This isn't a bad thing but it separates the comments and increases the reposts. If I'm scrolling all, sometimes I see 5+ of the same post with zero comments on each.
Another problem, it's not inherently easy to sign up. There are hundreds if not thousands of instances. If the instance you pick shuts down or goes down for a bit, well... you're SOL. I've lost two accounts on two instances that shut down.
Another problem, since it's not mainstream, there's not much content in niche communities. A lot of the niche communities that start up post a lot of bot content which no one engages with and then the community dies.
I still advocate moving over but there is a lot of work to be done to get the masses moved over.
The sad part is that all these issues have been known for a while now and none if them have been tackled at all so far.
How amazing would it be if you could just link your account with any instance at any time? My instance is down? No worries, I connect using another.
What if that community you are interested in doesn't have its' users split on 4 different instances making it even more niche than before?
What if when I create an account I get a list of suggested instances and a mini description so I don't have to immediately know what I'm doing and learn about this later? With proper account migration I could change this anytime I want.
On top of all of that I keep hearing the mod tools are atrocious.
When was the last time a major feature was added to lemmy? I think the only hope now is a different competitor on ActivityPub like piefed.
There aren't much niche topics here, sure. But the fewer engagement makes your engagement more valuable. On reddit I felt that all my comments went unheard unless I browsed new. It was actually a bit stressful to make my comments not be completely useless. On lemmy you're more likely to be heard and to emgage in actual conversation or discussion with an actual person.
One PC community, which I’m pretty sure died because I haven’t noticed any content from it in a few months, was using a bot to copy posts from Reddit but it made no sense because 50% of the posts were asking for tech support. Every post had 0 replies because, obviously, who would waste time replying when the OP who needed answers was on a different platform entirely.
This. Actually launching a community is hard. Launching a decentralized network of communities is damn hard.
I've been around for long enough to remember the internet before megasites like Reddit, when every community had their own forums and/or website. Specific mod for a specific game? Unique forum. Specific sub-community of a fandom, like a bunch of tech nerds analyzing the starships in Star Wars? Unique forum.
And like, I don't deny that losing that hurt. Each site had its own unique little flavor of community, and the great centralization of the internet definitely steamrolled that flat in favor of mainstream appeal. But centralizing did also improve ease of discovery and access. Now we're trying to build all of those little communities back in what - 2-3 years? In comparison to the 10+ they had to grow in before? It's not going to be easy.
...also the toxic out of control leftists
Also, the lack of moderation means communities are just sort of whatever the hell people who are currently posting want them to be. Serious abuse usually gets handled eventually, but posts and comments are frequently off-topic. Lots of communities don't even have rules.
Idk if this has been a thing or not but why isn’t there a way to “merge” viewing of communities with similar content? Like why can’t I just say show me all posts with the community named “asklemmy” and show all posts regardless of the instance it’s on as long as it’s federated with your instance. If that is a thing, why is that not extremely obvious and easy to do and arguably not just the default behavior when looking for communities? Different instances will probably have different rules but the content will probably be similar and relevant.