this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025

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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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The biggest problems with Lemmy right now (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Davy_Jones@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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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.
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)
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)
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)
Performance / reliability / scaling problems
- “Slow and unreliable” is listed among cons. (Slant)
- “Servers go down … syncing/federation issues.” (Android Authority)
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)
Search and archive weak/incomplete
- “Search sucks … Lemmy isn’t.” (szmer.info)
- Lack of long-tail content archive.
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.

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[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Sorry, but no private profiles please. This isn't Facebook. Its a public forum. Allowing users to hide their history just encourages trolling, astroturfing and erodes the high trust culture of the fediverse.

This is also why I suppose public voting, and public modlogs.

Reddit is notably degraded due to them allowing users to hide their post history now.

Duplicate communities existing is both good and bad. It means that badly run communities can be redesigned and overtaken on other instances if enough users are angry with how its run. Although, yes, duplication is an issue. Piefed feeds and crossposting mitigates this somewhat.

The search on fediverse isn't perfect, but its far better than Reddits useless search tools. I will hear no lectures here.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Reddit's search has noticeably improved. Ours hasn't. Plus you can always search reddit via external search, but federation breaks traditional search engines

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago

I meant searching within subreddits (communities) - using it to find new relevant communities. Piefeds community browser is great for this, allowing filtering by activity, combined with the feed system.

[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Point #1 tells me you don't understand the concept of federation. Most of your source links are broken, so which old troll post did you copy + paste this from?

23 hours ago you posted saying you were leaving lemmy for instagram, why are you still here complaining?

[–] admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 1 points 1 month ago

I think it's more useful to take their points at their own merit, rather than factor in who said it. Who cares if they said they were leaving, or if they torture puppies in their spare time. There's no need to make it personal - feedback is feedback. IMHO a user shouldn't have to know about federation or how it works - if lemmy wants widespread adoption, tackling these issues will help.

[–] myszka@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Most of these just seem to be features of decentralisation. And if decentralisation isn't your thing, neither is Lemmy honestly. Just stick to Reddit.

I really think Fediverse shouldn't be thought of as an alternative to proprietary social media that any average user can just switch to. There's a completely different mindset behind it, where you're not a passive consumer but a creator and a developper, responsible for the growth of the project the same way its original creators are. Same thing as with Windows and Linux.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What so anyone who doesn't have a particular interest in decentralization should just leave? That's a great way to lose 98% of your userbase

[–] rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don't think they were saying users need to have an interest in decentralisation, more that some of these complaints seem specifically like problems with a very core principle of Lemmy (decentralisation), and that disliking a fundamental and (as far as I'm aware) unchangeable aspect of a platform might mean the platform isn't a good fit for those users.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago

As long as they don't dislike decentralization itself, we can definitely improve the user experience for some of these things without having to drop decentralization entirely.

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

For 8, people should use Piefed and its built-in keyboard filters.

For 3, people should use Piefed and its comments consolidation for crossposts.

I'm also archiving this topic as you'll probably delete it soon.

https://archive.is/38SxX

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I never get the duplicate communities complaint. Just about every topic has at least three communities on Reddit.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah, but one usually dominates because it often has the most intuitive url. And also Reddit has a much larger audience, so many very similar communities can exist for one topic.

[–] Steve@communick.news 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Privacy is antithetical to ActivityPub federated networks. Everything on Lemmy, Mastodon, Pifed, PeerTube, etc is absolutely public. There is no way to prevent people from seeing anything to post to any of these services.

Real privacy needs to be a built in function from the very beginning. It's not really possible within ActivityPub.

Everyone needs to understand this. There is no privacy here. There won't be, because there can't be. That's the way it is.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There's a difference between full guaranteed privacy that not even the NSA could get past and showing your post history by default in a nice UI for everyone to browse

[–] Steve@communick.news 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Yes. The later makes very clear to everyone, they don't have any privacy here.
My point is, that's a good thing.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Why does it have to be all or nothing? Why can't I have some casual privacy, to stop every idiot from gawking at my post history?

If you want people to know, just put a big banner there "YOUR POST HISTORY IS NOT FULLY PRIVATE"

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Sorry, so you don't object to post history being public on the fediverse - but simply want it said plainly that "Post history is not private" directly to users?

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

No I want it to be private (optionally) . The other guy was saying it's not fully private still so I think you can tell users that if they want to make it private, but that shouldn't be a reason to not make it private

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.ml 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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.

[–] Steve@communick.news 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Because people don't pay attention to signs.
You knowing people can easily see everything you've posted, effects your behavior here, far more than any banner you'd also complain about having to click past every time.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Then too bad? Why should my privacy be compromised because other people don't pay attention.

Also you don't have to click past it, I was just suggesting a static banner on the profile page, or next to the setting where'd you'd turn it off

[–] Steve@communick.news 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Your privacy is compromised eithor way. That's the point. You just don't want it to be so obvious. Like putting a spare key under the welcome mat at your door, that's a bad idea.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's better than leaving the door unlocked

[–] Steve@communick.news 1 points 1 week ago

Not when it gives you a false sense of security.