Same as with every other social media ... the people.

Not enough people for even slightly niche communities. Wanna talk about smash brothers ? 732 people, only 2 posts in the last month.

This is why people still use reddit on the side.

The lemmy.ml instance not being treated the same as the rest of the Triad in regards to defederation

Some highlights from the link:

"Don't worry guys, the Uyghur Genocide was REALLY just birth control! ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/30580167

"See! nobody died IN Tiananmen Square, just AROUND it, so it doesn't count!!" ~ Davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/30673342

.ml admin, Nutomics continued transphobia https://lemmy.world/post/29222558

CW: Original transphobic Comment from Nutomic

"NK is actually good and anything counter to that is Western propaganda!" ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/31595035

General negative sentiment to other instances who haven't "seen the way" yet ~davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/27426510

"If you don't support Russia then you just don't understand geopolitics" ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/27352415

And a long list of bans/censorship and allowing the proliferation of known propaganda and misinformation outlets clearly demonstrating use of their instance and recognition to force a political narrative

Duplicate communities posting the same content over and over again.

Communities are tied to an instance. How many communities will die because lemm.ee is shutting down? There is a slightly mad rush to migrate communities already.

Lemmy should have used usent style naming for communities.

The lack of content compared to reddit. If you look at !learn_programming@programming.dev for example, there is only one post this week, and 4 posts this month. How is it that, with all the web developers and AI vibe coding shit, no one is actually asking questions?

When I was on reddit, I had to hide posts because there were 10 or 20 interesting questions every day.

Issues that would be solved by time/gaining more users

• Not nearly enough people to cover all the niche interest communities that Reddit does. At Reddit you find an expert on almost any topic to help you with your problems and you'll find information on pretty much anything. Lemmy isn't there yet.
• Not nearly enough history. A lot of content is still good and informative after many years. Lemmy doesn't have a library of old-but-still-relevant content to search.

Issues independent of user count

• Search sucks. Reddit's search does too, but reddit is easily searchable via Google. Lemmy isn't.
• Onboarding is difficult, because you have to choose an instance, which is hugely important, but a newcomer has no idea what makes/is a good community to join

Issues that get worse with more users (aka, the potentially deal-breaking issues)

• Lemmy scales terribly. Every larger instance needs to retain a copy of pretty much all other content out there, and each comment/like/delete/update/... needs to be propagated to every other major instance out there. Adding more instances thus increases complexity and cost instead of decreasing it. Running a major lemmy instance is already prohibitively expensive now, with just about 50k monthly active users. If Lemmy was to scale to Reddit numbers (1.1 billion monthly active users, roughly 22 000x the number of users), everything would just break down.
• Moderation work scales just as terribly. Not only does an admin need to make sure the communities on their instance are moderated, but they also need to moderate all other communities on all other instances.
• Related to the last point, there's some legal issues as well if an admin doesn't moderate all other instances. Since content is copied from other instances to your instance, illegal content (e.g. illegal pornography, copyrighted works, ...) are also copied to your own server without your active participation. That makes it legally mandatory to moderate all other communities.
• Legal pitfalls in general. If lemmy becomes sizeable enough, all sorts of laws in regards to social media platforms will apply. That's one thing if the social media platform is run by a huge corporation with a legal department, but it's an entirely different story for a tiny group of non-profit idealists running the social media platform.

The same issue Bluesky and other app-killer platforms have/had at the start: momentum. Momentum explains everything else. If you leave out the vapid content on Reddit, it's still the premier place for asking questions and getting them answered by enthusiastic amateurs or actual experts in the field. The moment Lemmy gets the same quality tech support and DIY responses, it will have its place. Or, like with Bluesky, Reddit needs to become as alienating and disgusting as X became after the Elon takeover.

As everyone has pointed out, people and content. Its good in some ways since not every post is drowned out with one thousand replies nobody will ever see, but at the same time, you're not getting much of anything at all sometimes. Not even very niche ones either. Even groups that represent entire states has limited info or replies still. If it can grow to that size and see some more unique and local content more I think even that would be a much better place for it to be.

The lack of continuous and backlogged content. For some this is a benefit because it gives them a reason to stop scrolling, but for others who come here to look for answers, find entertainment, or anonymously voice their opinions, this can be something of a downside.

Of course this platform is as anonymous as you make it, but I've seen some people say they refrain from commenting more often because they don't want to be known as a regular, instead wanting to "blend in to the crowd" as one would on more populous sites like Reddit or Twitter.

Niche communities. Also, attempts at niche communities getting dogpiled by everyone else (no, “this administration” really doesn’t have anything to do with the pedestrianisation of Norwich city centre.)

User volume and diversity is probably the main thing right now.

We just need more people posing shit, the fact that one or two users can dominate my feed if they choose to is not ideal. (Though often I appreciate the content anyway)

The diversity aspect is around how we have a lot of people in a small handful of demographics on here. It's getting better every day, but the thing that made Reddit great before they ruined it was everything you could think of had a community of people posing stuff about it, doesn't matter how niche.

One leads to the other though, more users naturally will mean increasingly diverse interests in our userbase.

It's about time Reddit fucked something else up anyway, it's been a few months

The tankies

I have trouble finding um what are they called here... Communities?... for the subjects I'm interested in. When I search, all I find is old posts or unrelated posts.

That's my biggest problem

It’s too difficult to block huge swaths of things you’re not interested in. Like sports, or memes, or music. You block one community and 99 more about the same subject appear in your feed.

Adding some sort of Usenet-style organization or sublemmy tagging might help.

Trying to be a Reddit clone.

Reddit was shit to begin with. It was a dumbed down forum site for people who found sites like Plastic or Kuro5hin too intimidating or complicated(!).

Slashdot-style upvoting would instantly solve a lot of "Reddit"-type problems, because instead of just good/bad, or like/dislike, the reason for the vote is noted, such as "insightful", "funny", etc., and you can then filter and sort comments much easier. Just filtering out "funny" comments saved soooooooo much time.

Another thing: Why don't creators of threads have the option to admin their own threads? It's their thread! It wouldn't be appropriate for discussion threads (for obvious reasons), but for interpersonal posts and questions, it makes perfect sense for the creator to be able to have control over what appears in the thread to keep it on topic and the trolls at bay. It's pretty rare to see a post where someone asks a question that doesn't quickly devolve into an offtopic mess, and the creator is usually attacked for trying to bring it back on topic. This has made Reddit useless for question-answering (and besides, the most upvoted answer is almost always wrong.)

Is the purpose of these forums to enable authentic conversation, or just to farm content regardless of quality (to be sold to AI companies, presumably)?

Smaller user base. It is both good and bad but the community for my city is dead (probably there were only like 8 of us on here).

Am old enough to know from experience that the early people on any platform are the computer geeks so expect the tech communities to thrive first - but as someone else said, music communities die, sports, arts, things that are pretty widely popular. Honestly happy with the slow and steady growth of the !cocktails@lemmy.world so if it's an indicator, the general interest people are joining just not quickly but some must be sticking. I would guess at some point it will be perfect then too big but who knows?

Personally I also miss the nonsexual nudes threads like nakedprogress and normalnudes. Again that's a lack of users issue, you need a lot of people willing to post, to have even a few willing to post nude.

Repeated content. When I doomscroll I see the same posts I've already seen instead of less popular ones.

not enough of my niche interests from reddit moved here. also the sports communities are a little bit like ghost towns

Lemmy devs - they are a curse and a blessing. A blessing that they worked on lemmy before reddit exodus. A curse as it's hard to contribute to the codebase and related components.

At least we have mbin and piefed to federate with.

Also in the 2 years since, the culture has shifted. There is less: "This is a new place. let's make it enjoyable for everyone" and more "I am right, everyone is wrong, and I will ruin your day", but that could be just my perception and not enough blocking.

Lemmy was architected by people whose philosophical intentions are out of alignment with the software they cloned.

That system was designed to invite as many idiots as possible, to bait as much engagement as possible, with virtually no controls on quality or intelligence.

Well congratulations Lemmy, you've made the next Reddit. There's no reason to be here, it's just a pile of morons for the most part.

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.

Duplicated fragmentation

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.

for me, no option to follow posts / comments, mostly to see new comments / replies and create proper aggregation of responses, any opinion dynamics and so on — this makes everything very temporary / short lived

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 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.