Here is my notes from using Lemmy:
- There is core limitations on Lemmy which cannot be fixed even on the long term( for example finding communities via search. Results from .world is very different from the result that your instance fetch, no ability to upload media with the same ease and speed of Reddit,...etc);
- Herd mentality is very deep on Lemmy, compared to other social media websites;
- People seem to take disagreements in opinions personally, which is weird on it's own;
- Lemmy users would like to have a working cancel culture so much that they would have no problem deepthroating a dick to get it;
- Lemmy users and with them Digg 2.0 users, hate with passion anyone who criticize their platform and is ready to go against logic to defend it;
- Lemmy Admins and moderators seem to have a control fetish: on Reddit, it was very normal and easy to me to reach out to a mod to restore my posts or to explain himself and even discuss and change rules or reverse discussions. Yes there was some of them who also had control fetish, but in the communities which I used to use that was kind of rare. Meanwhile here there is no modbox functionality which complicates talking with mods;
- Some Lemmy users seem to be easy to obsessive over things.
I feel there needs to be disclaimer on Lemmy servers/introduction page to warn people about negativity on the platform, but I don't think it will ever happen.
About moderation, I feel the only outcome that will happen is bad moderation (IMO) will keep happening on the platform till either the servers hosting communities go down or till the mod become inactive.
On a side note it feels like a lot of Lemmy servers are suffering financially and might close soon, while Lemmy developers did not even try to help them by implementing third party upload functionality(Imgbox, catbox, imgur,...etc) in the app and the web front end to lighten the load on the server admins. Right now most Lemmy servers I know of are protected by Cloudflare and pictures uploaded on some servers don't open natively(you need to click it as a normal link and pass cloudflare verification to see image).
It's what it's here. but I just wanted to lay out what I think about Lemmy culture, moderation and software.
Lemmy Federate is designed to overcome this limitation through automated community federation.
This depends on the frontend or app you choose to use. Most Lemmy apps support in-app media uploads.
Herd mentality is just as much of a problem of Reddit; there's just more users there, so more 'herds' are able to form.
Grouping all Lemmy users together falsely assumes they all share the same opinions and blocking preferences. In any case, instances attract users by tailored moderation practices; users should join the instance that best matches their preferences. While some viewpoints—such as those promoting fascism, transphobia, or racism—are generally unwelcome across major instances, a certain baseline is needed in civilized society to have discussions in which no one is excluded on the basis of who they are.
A very broad generalization about a wide array of moderators and rules across communities, but if you don't like the way a community or instance is run, just block it and move on. I gladly block all of lemmy.ml and my All feed is better for it.
What gives that impression? While donating towards server costs is important, and a handful of notable instances such as lemm.ee have closed, most instances seem to be doing fine.
Have you tried alternative frontends and/or apps? The default Lemmy frontend is known to be simplistic in comparison and should be considered more of a reference implementation than anything.
Ultimately, the Threadiverse is still relatively small and will hopefully continue to improve as Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin are developed further. All of the core features of Reddit are present, without the commercialization that has left it degraded.