The regular daily users on Lemmy are likely not using subscription feeds very much if at all. Those that are less regular are likely using these features more, but they are far less likely to discover new communities.

In my opinion, there is a disconnect with people that expect Lemmy to mirror other platforms 1:1 or nearly. This perspective is lacking an understanding of the scale of the user base. Building hyper niche communities and expecting them to grow organically out of a vacuum is a fallacy. Communities must grow as branches of a tree where they are born out of a strong base community.

This is where bad moderation is a massive problem. We need loosely defined, liberally moderated, strong general communities first. These must have minimal rules and mostly passive moderation so that you know c/food is a safe place to post anything about your pancakes even if it is a pancake with tomato sauce, cheese, pineapple, and ham. You should know that c/food is a place where even your odd pancake will get some love and motivate you to share whatever heinous pastry topping atrocity you make in the asylum kitchen next week. /s

Bad mods that are overactive and largely narcissistic are in my opinion the largest problem on Lemmy. There is nothing hard about being a mod. The community does all of the real work of flagging issues because the community ultimately is all that matters. The rules are guidelines. Flags need to be handled with care and depth. Just because someone flags something that does not mean they are correct. I've flagged some stuff that was poorly explained and ineffective, where only admin could have seen what I was talking about. I've also seen a few where the person flagging is the underlying problem. There is certainly need to weed out bigots and I'm not for harming anyone. There are places where heavy moderation is important and needed, but that kind of mindset bleeds into the periphery too much here IMO.

As a user, I don't want authoritarian stupidity and narcissistic nonsense. I like having options for posting in other parallel communities when I see some community has a dozen pedantic rules. I will just post in the more obscure place that is not so narcissistic and anti community in the big picture perspective.

While I appreciate having those obscure options, I think it is a MAJOR fallacy to allow narcissistic mods to continue in any community but especially large and high participation communities. Mods do not matter. No one has ever made a post or comment because they checked who the mods are and used that information as a reason for posting or commenting. They post because of the way the place intuitively resonates, if it seems like a safe place, and because of the social democratic participation within the space. The only community that can be owned by a mod is the one where the mod is the only person that has ever posted. If you do not agree with this, you are ultimately a fascist authoritarian, whether you can see and acknowledge that is not my problem. Communities are a de facto democracy when multiple users post within them. The mod does not own these users, their posts, or the comments. The mod is only a custodian; a janitor. The mod comes last. The mod is a servant, not a leader. Anyone making forced posts is doing more harm than good. Some people are really great at finding good content and posting regularly. This role is not tied to the implications and responsibilities of being a mod. This convolution of participation and moderation is the primary issue at the largest scale of abstraction that goes unaddressed in the link aggregation platform format and remains outside of collective awareness. The convolution of the mod role in abstract, masks emotional investment and fixation of narcissists, and that leads to harmful actions towards well intentioned users and purging of any difference in opinion that evokes a negative emotion from an underlying authoritarian or egomaniacal person. The resultant actions cull true diversity of perspectives and conversational depth in an extremest like feedback loop. When users participate in good faith and receive mob like negativity, it is bad for Lemmy growth. However, when good faith participation results in mod actions it causes disenfranchisement on another level and often leads to short or long term migration off of the platform.

A moderator should have a better ethical foundation. We are all humans. We are all often wrong, or misunderstood. Still, in these instances, as a human you have a right to exist. We all have bad days or overreact with our emotions at times. Yet still, you have a right to exist. Some of us are compromised in various ways that may require a measure of empathy kindness and understanding that the average person in the community is not capable of understanding by default due to outlier circumstance. The person may be depressed, abused, in isolation, or neurodivergent in various ways. These are especially vulnerable to harm from a narcissistic mod. In some of these cases, disenfranchisement from negative interaction may directly contribute to real world harm and even death through indirect means. For this reason, all moderator actions MUST be considered harmful by default. Enforcing opinion, pedantism, and all unnecessary actions against a well intentioned user are reckless narcissism without the abstract big picture understanding of what is best for the real humans that the actions impact. Ignoring these potential edge cases is authoritarian incompetence and shows the person lacks the ethical foundation required to be fair and just, acting in the best interest of the community.

The issue of poor moderation through de facto authoritarianism grossly contradicting democratic participation of all users, is the primary issue of all link aggregators that goes unaddressed.

The biggest issue for Lemmy at the moment is instances that do not update to the latest version of Lemmy. If devs are hamstrung from fixing issues in new revisions, the entire platform and discussion of growth is mute. When the largest instance on Lemmy (LW) is not on the latest version of Lemmy, or the devs fail to ensure the stability required, progress is halted and complaints are useless negativity with no potential for change.