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.

It’s just as much a left-wing echo chamber as Truth Social is a right-wing one - and that’s a problem in both cases. Some might say it’s fine because we’re on the right side of history and they’re not, or something along those lines - but the people on Truth Social think the exact same thing. No one’s views ever change that way.

The tankies are far and away the largest problem. It's the number one reason why lemmy hasn't grown. Even when I signed up years ago from the reddit exodus every post I saw was heavily cautioned with "it's filled with tankies". And now every mention of it is being scrubbed for that reason. The second problem is the smaller size but see reason 1 for that.

Third problem is the sign up process being so excruciating. I understand it's to prevent bots but for every 2 bots it's preventing it's probably also preventing 1 actual user from signing up. I love this place despite the small size, because I can just sequester off all the tankies entirely on Connect, but if the creators don't realize they're actively standing in the way of growth by the actions they're taking and step away from all their moderation actions to focus on administration and development instead the outlook doesn't look too great.

Duplicated fragmentation

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.

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.

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.)

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

We need more users, to do that we need more advertising.

I was waiting to leave reddit for like a year before i found out about lemmy.

There's no way the twitter clone Bluesky should have absorbed the fleeing reddit users instead of this space that functions just like reddit.

Trying to be a Reddit clone.

Reddit was shit to begin with. It was a dumbed down forum site for people who found sites like Plastic or Kuro5hin too intimidating or complicated(!).

Slashdot-style upvoting would instantly solve a lot of "Reddit"-type problems, because instead of just good/bad, or like/dislike, the reason for the vote is noted, such as "insightful", "funny", etc., and you can then filter and sort comments much easier. Just filtering out "funny" comments saved soooooooo much time.

Another thing: Why don't creators of threads have the option to admin their own threads? It's their thread! It wouldn't be appropriate for discussion threads (for obvious reasons), but for interpersonal posts and questions, it makes perfect sense for the creator to be able to have control over what appears in the thread to keep it on topic and the trolls at bay. It's pretty rare to see a post where someone asks a question that doesn't quickly devolve into an offtopic mess, and the creator is usually attacked for trying to bring it back on topic. This has made Reddit useless for question-answering (and besides, the most upvoted answer is almost always wrong.)

Is the purpose of these forums to enable authentic conversation, or just to farm content regardless of quality (to be sold to AI companies, presumably)?

1. Not enough people.

2. People here are way bigger smug assholes than even Reddit.

3. Sense of invulnerability and mod neglegence just because Lemmy is defederated. People naively think that makes it invulnerable to similar issues as Reddit (like toxicity/hivemind/bad modding.)

Back in 2023 I joined Lemmy because Reddit got rid of 3rd party apps. At first I was extremely impressed with the content here. While the community was small, meme channels were hilarious and had fantastic content. Same with the nsfw communities. However, now all the communities are filled with AI slop, political ragebait posting, onlyfans subsciption bait posts, and various other trash. So as far as I'm concerned Lemmy seems to be circling the drain. I can't in good faith tell anyone I know to switch to Lemmy. If a friend were to ask me "hey man, how's Lemmy?" My honest answer would be that it kinda fucking sucks.

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