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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  1. 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.

  2. 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)

  3. 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)

  4. 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)

  5. Performance / reliability / scaling problems

    • “Slow and unreliable” is listed among cons. (Slant)
    • “Servers go down … syncing/federation issues.” (Android Authority)

  6. 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)

  7. Search and archive weak/incomplete

    • “Search sucks … Lemmy isn’t.” (szmer.info)
    • Lack of long-tail content archive.

  8. 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 21 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 2 weeks 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 3 points 2 weeks 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 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 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?

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 10 points 1 month ago

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

Same question here

[–] admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

This aren't even the OPs original thoughts, they have either looked up other grievances or just copy and pasted this from some other old post. Most of the comments are old news too.

They don't really seem interested in discussing this

[–] rimu@piefed.social 7 points 1 month ago

Seems like OP just copy and pasted some perplexity.ai output.

[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 month ago

I normally agree, but this feels like a troll post where op asked AI for a list of sources hating on lemmy. There's no effort to make suggestions or start an actual conversation about it.

[–] Steve@communick.news 15 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It's better than leaving the door unlocked

[–] Steve@communick.news 1 points 2 weeks ago

Not when it gives you a false sense of security.

[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 month ago

Lack of granular privacy / profile control

This has been covered. This is a content-sharing network. Emphasis on both sharing and network. This means things that are posted are, by design, sent across the network. It's not a walled garden; it's the antithesis of a walled garden.

The only way for your posts to be seen by people on other websites is for those posts to be sent to those other websites, openly.

Poor content discovery / lack of niche communities / limited diversity

This isn't a Lemmy issue, but the fact that it keeps coming up again and again framed as one is telling of the giant misconception people have about the Fediverse in general, and "Lemmy" in particular.

Lemmy is not a website. Or a space. It's a website engine. Complaining about the quality or variety of content "on Lemmy" is like complaining about the content "on WordPress".

The content that is here is actually almost magically discoverable, because that content likely didn't start where you are, and website search bars only search their own databases. This is as true of lemmy.dbzer0.com as it is of Google itself. That's why webspiders exist, to bring the content of the internet into Google's database.

Fragmentation across instances / duplication of communities

This is the nature of linking multiple different forum-based websites together. Some of them will have their own sub-forums for their own population to use that are similar to sub-forums on another website. Those two sub-forums may have similar, or even the same, name, but that doesn't mean they should be treated as the same place by people outside of them.

The constant drive by people not using those sub-forums to consolidate said sub-forums, because of fucking aesthetics, is pretty directly disrespectful to the people using those sub-forums.

"Lemmy" is not a singular space. It's a network of independent websites that have agreed to syndicate content. That means they are both in cooperation and competition with each other. Kicking and screaming that one or another should give up its own various cultures and nuances for the sake of some pan-fediverse whole is kind of a dick move.

It's one thing if two websites just want to explicitly merge, but to just be like "why is there Burger King and McDonald's on the same street? Everyone should just be in one burger joint!" is kinda entitled.

Bad User Experience (UX) / usability issues

Reddit users complaining that things are different isn't really good evidence of bad UX. At least the NodeBB discussion is getting close to the fundamental issue, but everyone seems to want the solution to it to be to force websites running Lemmy servers to act as dumb nodes in someone else's project. And you're not going to get too many hobby site owners signing up for that.

The solution is to highlight the independence of Fediverse websites, but then you get everyone whining about how small it is, how hard it is to find things, blah blah blah.

Search and archive weak/incomplete

Search is actually pretty good, if you're on a busy server. At least in my experience.

Archiving old content, though... That's getting back into a whole "demand volunteers shoulder the responsibility for hosting other websites' content indefinitely" thing.

Over-representation of particular content types (US-news, memes, agenda posts) and low content-quality

And we're back to "users aren't talking about what I want to hear", which... K.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

To respond to some of these:

Lack of granular privacy / profile control

Fair, but also lemmy isn't trying to be a facebook-style social network, but a reddit alternative. So the main action isn't really following people, but following communities. GNU social and others probably do granularity and limited sharing better.

Poor content discovery / lack of niche communities / limited diversity

There are a few external tools to help with this, but @Nutomic also built in a feature for new instances to pull various popular communities, that will be in lemmy 1.0 . This should help with some content and communities being on new instances.

Fragmentation across instances / duplication of communities

This is a feature, not a bug. Many communities run by different people, with different userbases, is a good thing. !news@startrek.com is going to be different from !news@starwars.com and !news@ghana.com

Bad User Experience (UX) / usability issues

There are like 10 different open source apps for lemmy, on every platform, with completely different UIs and experiences. This is a far better ecosystem than anything else I can think of (especially reddit), and if someone has problems with UIs on any of them, they can contribute.

Performance / reliability / scaling problems

Will always be an issue that needs work, but lemmy has scaled up to support ~40k active monthly users without too many issues. Most of our problems are database, not network related. Both problems can be solved solely by development resources.

Moderation, safety tools, and content-quality issues

Mods can remove all content at the click of a button, and users can report items. I'd need specifics on other things that are missing.

Search and archive weak/incomplete

Would need more specifics here, but we have a lot of search filters and capabilities.

Over-representation of particular content types (US-news, memes, agenda posts) and low content-quality

Somewhat unavoidable on anglo-net, and especially when people are drawing in large numbers of users from reddit, which suffers from that above. Also there are some servers that do no moderation on US content, and let it overrun every single community. Here we try to keep it on /c/usa unless it affects the greater world, and we also try to remove low-quality drumpf says type-memes that overrun reddit.

[–] Admin@startrek.website 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

What you call "fragmentation" is perhaps better described as "multiple moderation philosophies applied to the same topic" and is actually a fundamental aspect of the ActivityPub protocol, which was designed above all else to create platforms that resist centralization.

I'm not saying you're wrong to dislike it, but it is definitionally impossible to have both decentralization and centralization at the same time.

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 9 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 9 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 3 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.

[–] myszka@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 month ago (2 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.

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)
[–] myszka@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

Pure comedy 🤣🤣🤣 I wonder if there're people like that who use Linux

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks 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 1 points 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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.

[–] kersploosh@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

1: @Skavau@piefed.social is right.

2, 7, 8: What's the goal here? Is Reddit the gold standard we're aiming for? I'm not convinced Lemmy needs millions of daily active users to keep a plethora of niche communities active, and to store a massive backlog for posterity. It's fine if Lemmy is smaller and narrower in scope.

3: Reddit has duplicate/overlapping communities, too. I'm not sure how to avoid this without either (a) top-down control of community creation by admins, or (b) constant pruning of communities by admins. Neither are desirable, IMO.

4, 5, somewhat 7: Adjust expectations to reality, and appreciate what we have. Lemmy isn't Reddit 2.0 and it never will be. There isn't big venture capital money sloshing around. But Lemmy has come along way without it. Hundreds of instances hum along reliably, day-in and day-out. There are surprisingly good browser UI's (look at Photon/Tesseract/Alexandrite) mobile apps. Not bad for an open-source project that runs on volunteer time and user donations!

6: The complaint about moderation tools is legit. I really want a better reports queue, among other things. But I don't have the time and energy to contribute code, so I wait patiently.

[–] SuperDuperKitten@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 month ago

1. Lack of granular privacy / profile control

I mean, Lemmy is based on Reddit which you publicly discuss a topic. I'm not sure how having options to create a comment private benefits Lemmy at all unless you can give me a reason.

2. Poor content discovery / lack of niche communities / limited diversity

To be fair on Lemmy, it is still new in compassion to Reddit so there would be as fewer communities compared to Reddit. If you don't mind being a moderator, you can always create a community which I can see some Lemmings would like to join.

3. Fragmentation across instances / duplication of communities

I won't lie, it does confused me a bit as I tend to try at least find one that's more active and post from there. Also, it runs by different moderators which some their decision you may not be fond of so at least you have the same topic of the community but on different instance.

8. Over-representation of particular content types (US-news, memes, agenda posts) and low content-quality

Read my opinion at point 2, think that pretty relevant. But yes, I agree there's lot of US-Based news and lucky for me, there's both an Lemmy instance and community for people in Britain (I'm born there) so it's nice reading news from my own country beside how incompetent Keir Starmer is.

The best if you want is following World News community or make one for whatever country you're in and try advertised it on Lemmy (please don't spam it on random threads, that won't be cool.)