There's also a vocal minority of just really pessimistic people on here. Politics I don't mind as long as it's a discourse about not only what is bad but what can be reasonably done about it.

I've been in several discussions where I add "look at community, we are strong together" and it's immediately beaten down with "the world won't change things are shit and always will be, be mad and angry about it, I'm mad and angry at you".

It's the internet, I'm not surprised. But I've definitely had to disconnect myself for a bit some days after severe reactions from people just to remember it's just strangers on the internet.

It's not all the time, but for some discussions that promote inclusion and understanding to be met with the hard "I don't agree so you are human garbage" can be an awful whiplash sometimes.

Relative to Reddit, probably the number of users. More users means more posts, more comments, more expertise on various areas, and more niche communities that become viable.

Somewhere down the list:

• Extremely determined negativity. There are a lot of...I don't know how to describe it. People who actively try to take the absolute, most utterly-pessimistic read on anything possible, to the point of having to make crazy assumptions to keep some kind of negative perspective on the thing. I don't know if it's people suffering from depression

which I understand can produce that effect

or doomerism or what, but it's exasperating. I haven't run into that sort of phenomenon, certainly not to anything like that degree, on other social media environments that I've used.

• The low-effort "capitalism bad" venting comments. I'm not really into far-left views, but that's not what irks me. I've seen people on here who you can at least talk to about left-wing positions. Like, some random user who is interested in, I don't know, adopting universal basic income and wants to talk about different proposals. But about 99% of the comments I see that contain the word "capitalism" don't amount to that. They're just venting. They aren't constructive. They don't reference any material. They aren't proposing any improvement or ideas or anything. All they want to do is to vent. I mean, it's like someone wanting to complain about their ex or how their sports team lost or something like that. And not only that, but a substantial percentage of those comments are complaining about something that has little to do with capitalism. Instead, it's virtually anything to do with the political or economic world that they don't like relative to some sort of idealized paradigm that they hold. You could use that "everything I don't like is woke" meme about the right, swap "woke" and "capitalism", and I swear, it'd apply to a lot of the comments. And I get that, yeah, one purpose of talking to people is to vent, and so you'd expect that occasionally when people talk to each other, sometimes they're gonna vent. That's human nature. But holy cow, as low-effort venting goes, the "capitalism bad" comments show up as a high proportion here.

  Occasionally I do talk about things, write larger comments about communal ownership. Like...okay, I know that on at least a couple of occasions, I've talked about the fact you've had communal ownership work at small scale, like families, say, or that there have been smaller organizations that have practiced communal ownership of property, and that maybe it'd be interesting to try working up in scale from smaller organizations to try and identify where any issues might crop up. And I have never had anyone actually respond with discussion when I do write something like that. No engagement. Like, it's not as if people have some raging unmet desire to talk about any of that. They just want to complain.

  I don't even see people who are writing "capitalism bad" comments engage in discussion with each other. Like, this isn't Marx and a bunch of activists in a London cafe throwing around ideas with each other. It's just one-off complaints, leaf comments in the thread.

I find it frustrating that so many communities are just for news articles. Look, I'm terminally politics-brained, but you'll never get anywhere if you're always just reacting to the current thing. There's not really a place for higher level discussion or for people to share thoughtful, original ideas. The result is thousands of the same arguments on the same three topics screaming the same talking points at each other over and over. And it seems like that's all people want.

Really more of a frustration with people in general. Wish people were more curious about the world.

The fact that it's mainly just a FOSS and Politics forum.

I love what the technology is trying to do but the thing is, the platform's main selling point being the liberatory potential of it's technology, is that it's mainly used by people who are interested in politics and technology.

4 times the same post in 4 different identically named communities...
I want a global feed, communities can federate with in a sort of sub-lemmy.

It is objectively a lot more male than Reddit or other social media.

Reddit circa 2010 was very male, nerdy, and often misogynistic. As it gained popularity, the community became more diverse. As it got more traction, these issues abated somewhat. Once it hit critical mass and became totally mainstream, the audience was diverse enough to make most people forget how it used to be. I miss when Reddit was at the “sweet spot” of being pretty diverse, yet not corporatized to shit.

Lemmy/Fediverse is still in its “early Reddit” stage now. It shows great potential but its basic premise and design probably prevents absolute mainstream adoption. Which is probably a good thing, but I would like to get closer to the sweet spot.

Having to block 30 different communities because they're all literally the same community.

It's even worse for NSFW communities. We don't need eleventy billion communities for the same super niche porn content.

That and people posting the same things on multiple communities because it technically fits even though there's already a niche community specifically for that topic.

One thing I've found is that people tend to have no chill. I've shared some posts with friends that don't use it and multiple times they've responded with "why are they so serious"

There is a lot of computing and a lot of politics, but not very much else.

The seemingly constant multiple posting and duplicates. There are people on here who find a link and post it individually to multiple communities without comment and without cross posting. Three or four times is bad enough, but I blocked someone a while back who posted the same link to about 15 separate communities one after the other. Other people then posted the exact same link to some of the same communities.

People who post links without any sort of comment too. Lemmy is a link aggregator and discussion forum, but most people ignore the second part. It's especially annoying when it's got a vague title and links to a shitty site with a paywall so that you can't even find out what it's about.

Community is too small

I think most of the things I find annoying about the fediverse (echo-chamber, lack of interactions overall, no real place for discussing extremely niche interests) stem from the fact that it is not big enough so...

I don't think it is a terrible thing per-se though, small communities have lots of upsides too

So many people here are on a constant hunt for a reason to attack, dunk on, or insult someone. They don't bother reading what's actually being said or giving anyone the benefit of the doubt. Instead they jump straight to conclusions about who you are based on one thing you said, and any disagreement immediately turns into a mud-slinging contest where nobody's even trying to change anyone's mind.

Your options end up being: speak up anyway and take endless grief for it, or start self-censoring and tweaking your views to fit the majority opinion on the platform - which basically means joining the crowd sniffing each other's farts and pretending they have something in common besides shared hatred of the outgroup.

My beef is that too many people are grinding Karma by posting the same crap to as many communities as possible, even though there's no Karma system, but they aren't there to discuss anything. So my feed is just all these OPs with no comments on them. Like you want me to read an article, or god forbid a 45 minute YouTube video, but you're not gonna start the conversation? Or reply to the people who do reply to you? Too many people looking for an audience; not enough people looking for conversation.

Pretty much just that.

I would like there to be more activity in a greater variety of communities, which I think will happen in time as the Fediverse grows. The main thing preventing me from posting my own interests and creations is a (probably excessive) caution about sharing personal/identifying things online, so I’m not going to criticize others for choosing the same. More users also tends to bring with it lower quality content, which leads to the next point:

As others like @tal@lemmy.today (who makes a lot of great comments in general) pointed out, there are a lot of political posts which seem more interested in venting their own frustrations and parroting popular opinions than having a constructive discussion and being receptive to different opinions. There is a lack of nuance. It’s possible to criticize the systems and people you do support without it meaning that you support the opposition, and it’s also possible you admit when someone you dislike makes a valid point without siding with them. You could even see a question like “how do I resolve this specific issue with Windows?” and one of the top responses will inevitably be something like “ew, you should be using Linux instead” and while I may not disagree, it does nothing to answer the question.

I’m not bothered by the gender ratios since it’s not a factor in how I interact with others, and users here are pretty quick to shut down rare instances of hostility towards a specific gender.

That Lemmys's not too different from Reddit.

Clickbait/ragebait gets upvoted to the top if it makes people feel good; hardly anyone even checks the source. Getting called out in the comments hardly affects it.

Niche content gets absolutely smothered by this, too, and the niche posters eventually give up.

These are structural problems Lemmy/Piefed software can improve, but that doesn't seem to be the development priority :/.

I'd argue this is a larger issue of the Fediverse, too. Devs are unintentionally copying structural issues, prioritizing other things when unhealthy attention patterns could kill the whole system. Like it has for previous social media alternatives. Lemmy feels more and more like Voat to me, which has got me really worried.

It's full of ignorant twats, just like everywhere else. The only difference is in what they are ignorant about

There is no roaming user system. One where you have the same user in PieFed, PixelFed, Mastodon, ... And if you have to change instance you only have to sign in into another one with that system and can migrate all the data at once.

I don't like that it's basically Reddit. people from Reddit came here and they act like it's Reddit and it's basically Reddit

Not nearly enough cats.