UnanimousStargazer

Lemmy is a decentralized platform that uses ActivityPub to offer an alternative to Reddit, but I’ve come to the conclusion it’s lacking serious development.

As I’m not a software developer myself, I cannot contribute to it’s development and therefore my critique is obviously unfair to sone extent: who am I to point out what’s wrong with Lemmy?

That said, I’ve decided to return to Reddit for now. The reason are at least three issues that I think should be fixed ASAP, but aren’t.

(1) No way to migrate communities or user accounts.

This is crucial IMO, as an instance administrator can suddenly decide to quit an instance, remove communities or stop updating the server. Most if not all administrators are volunteers working with donations, so there’s really nothing one can demand of course. But without a possibiliy to backup and migrate accounts and communities, there’s nothing you can do if a server has frequent issues.

Again, I don’t blame administrators. And yes, I know it’s possible to setup your own instance, but the fact is that most people don’t setup their own instance.

Mastodon does offer migration from one instance to another and I think Lemmy should offer it ASAP.

GitHub issue #3057

(2) No way to block or delete direct messages (DMs)

Every Lemmy user can start sending you DMs and there’s nothing you can do about it. As long as you don’t mind DMs, that’s fine of course. But I don’t want to receive them. Moreover, apparently people are receiving offensive DMs or spam, but it’s impossible to delete it without an administrator getting involved.

Allowing an account to DM you is one thing, but people sending you DMs without asking for them is really annoying. Not being able to delete them is taking it up even one more step.

Github issue #3640 and #3629

(3) Deleting user accounts

You can’t. Yup, that’s right. It’s apparently impossible to delete a user account.

Now this is plain stupid. I’ve decided to quit Lemmy for now, but had to resort to deleting every post and comment by hand first only to discover today it’s impossible to delete your user account. To be clear: I haven’t tried it yet, so this might be instance related. That said, one would say this isn’t rocket science, but it’s awaiting a fix for over a month now. But again, I’m not a developer so this might be a very difficult bug to fix.

Overall, IMO Lemmy isn’t a very well thought through platform. Development is slow and issues like migration tools still aren’t available.

My suggestion to the Voyager developers would be to invest time in the development of Lemmy first before putting in more time developing Voyager. It’s a really nice PWA and I hope the native app works out, but bottom line Lemmy currently isn’t up to it’s task yet IMO. There are too many issues laying around for too long.

Again, that’s easy for me to say as I don’t have the skills to contribute to the development in a sensible way. But for now, I’m returning to Reddit in full awaiting further Lemmy development.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

Some OPs are commented to with a large number of comments. It would be nice to get a visual indication how many new comments were added after the last time the OP was opened and (when the OP is opened) see what comments are new.

Lemmy communities by default offer RSS as an alternative way to subscribe to content and quickly get insight into new content that was published.

With Voyager, one is required to open the communities one by one and see if new content was added.

My request would result in something like:

[email protected] (5)

Where the number 5 indicates the number of new OPs in the community that were posted after the community was visited for the last time. Visually, I think it best to outline the number on the right and keep the name on the left.

Should social media platforms only allow upvotes or favorites?

As I understand it, Kbin doesn't allow downvotes just like Mastodon. Users can only mark a comment or OP favorite (upvote) and the Kbin user can see what account favorited / upvoted their comment or OP. Also if it's from a Lemmy user by the way.

Apollo allowed a user to search through the comments. This can be helpful if the number of comments to an OP is large.

If you submit an OP that becomes popular, your inbox can get crowded very fast.

Apollo allowed you to mute the notifications in your inbox for a certain OP.

I see a very small minority of people using Kbin, but I don't understand why.

Is this just a coincidence and did some people choose Kbin over Lemmy or is there a good reason to use Kbin?