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.
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
It’s not exactly at a place where someone joins lemmy. Most people likely join via downloading an app, and if they are lucky that app links them to join-lemmy.org, and more often than not, it doesn’t link them anywhere and just asks them to either select an instance from a dropdown without further information or it asks them to enter an instance name from memory.
The advice is very questionable and not really helpful without context.
Lemmy.world is too big
There are Lemmy-reasons for why that’s a problem, but in any other context, the biggest is the best. And even in regards to lemmy, bigger instances have a higher chance to remain, to be decently moderated and to be decently stable. Before joining Lemmy.world, I was on Feddit.de, and we all know how that ended. And even before they vanished without a warning or an explanation, Feddit.de servers were always outdated, slow and unreliable, and moderation was arbitrary at best and non-existent at worst.
That’s a somewhat decent reasoning, though not immediately understandable as a new user. And not relevant anymore because Lemm.ee will shutdown within a week or so from now.
sh.itjust.works names contains “shit”, which can deter users
Thanks, I’m adult enough to know whether I’m offended by the word “shit”.
lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric
feddit.org, is German-centric, but technically English speaking too
programming.dev is topic-centric
blahaj is queer-focused
infosec.pub is topic-centric
aussie.zone is country-centric
midwest.social is region-centric
None of that really matters thanks to federation.
dbzer0 federates hexbear
Like Lemm.ee, apart from the fact that it still exists
ut what’s left regardless is: Even that link that is supposed to make instance selection easier isn’t exactly easy to understand for a newcomer.
Newcomers are supposed to just read
"
Lemmy has 47k monthly active users
https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
https://vger.app/settings/install if you want an app
Feel free if you have any questions
"
The rest was up for debate, feel free to copy paste your comment in that thread so that other people can see it as well
Issues that would be solved by time/gaining more users
Issues independent of user count
Issues that get worse with more users (aka, the potentially deal-breaking issues)
https://lemmy.world/post/25308391
That’s honestly not very helpful.
There are Lemmy-reasons for why that’s a problem, but in any other context, the biggest is the best. And even in regards to lemmy, bigger instances have a higher chance to remain, to be decently moderated and to be decently stable. Before joining Lemmy.world, I was on Feddit.de, and we all know how that ended. And even before they vanished without a warning or an explanation, Feddit.de servers were always outdated, slow and unreliable, and moderation was arbitrary at best and non-existent at worst.
Lemmy.world is stable and works just as expected.
That’s a somewhat decent reasoning, though not immediately understandable as a new user. And not relevant anymore because Lemm.ee will shutdown within a week or so from now.
Thanks, I’m adult enough to know whether I’m offended by the word “shit”.
None of that really matters thanks to federation.
Like Lemm.ee, apart from the fact that it still exists
That’s some relevant reasoning.
See also:
Sopuli.xyz isn’t any easier than discuss.tchnics.de, and jet discuss.tchnics.de was excluded for the name only.
While down in the comments it says
Which is a really hard reason to avoid that instance, much more so than “has a difficult name”. That’s got much more practical implications.
But what’s left regardless is: Even that link that is supposed to make instance selection easier isn’t exactly easy to understand for a newcomer.
Relevant XKCD:
Newcomers are supposed to just read
" Lemmy has 47k monthly active users
Feel free if you have any questions "
The rest was up for debate, feel free to copy paste your comment in that thread so that other people can see it as well