From what I've heard, some instances can be really slow or break often

Any talk of religion in a non-negative way and the pitchforks come out.

The irrationality and hyper emotional state of a lot of commenters. Not saying there isn’t due cause these days* but people GET. A. GRIP. and control yourself. You aren’t helping others or yourself with that behavior. It’s super immature.

*I’m not talking about being angry. I’m talking about how do I go on living emotional responses.

Niche communities. Large spaces are built of small niche interest groups. The tooling around small spaces needs to be first class if we want the larger space to be healthy

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Duplicated fragmentation

Some Communities are still controlled by people with absurd egos and overconfidence. Most of them hate people too, which is fun for a community manager.

I think it mirrors real life though, the type of people who want to be leaders tend to be assholes, and the ones who would be good at leading won't volunteer to do it.

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

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.