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.

Definitely the amount of politics, it gets brought up in far too many places where it is unnecessary, I avoid political communities and stuff like that, yet I keep getting it in communities with 0 relation.

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.

There could be more activity in the arts and crafts communities. I want all of you to pick up a nice creative hobby like knitting or stitching right fucking now! And then post all of it!

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.

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.

I am forced to see posts in communities I am banned from for having an anti-ai stance AKA a working brain. I didn't block all of them soon enough.

What I am saying is that you should still be able to block communities you are banned from. Seeing them in my feed and being unable to get rid of them is like seeing cockroaches in a kitchen.

Mostly just the ratio of news/politics to fun/hobby posts. It's stuff I could already find on any other news platform or social media, and there's seldom discourse about the topics. It's often just negativity or some type of leftist gatekeeping. I'd rather just go to the AP news page and read it there.

I like seeing everyone's art, woodworking, 3D prints, origami, nature photos, and all that other good stuff way more. I like learning about you guys and your interests and I think having a small platform allows that, but many of us either forgot how to share things online or are too you to have ever been a part of mailing lists or IRC and the like.

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.

Way too much US-defaultism.

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.

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

The fucking politics oh my god, in every fucking community good lord. No way to filter it out either.

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"

Probably the lack of diversity among instances.

Everyone is still afraid of defederation, so we don't truly embrace what the fediverse is capable of.

I have a few things.

This place has groups that are singlemindedly bloodthirsty and happy to see people hurt, particularly in the US, and don’t have a problem stating so.

Tangentially - the far left extolling the virtues of governing systems that have never really worked due to weak protections against takeover by bad actors and ignoring that those systems are just as corruptible as any other. Humans are f’d up and someone always games the system for personal or tribal advantage.

Linux. Yeah, it’s great. No, it cannot do everything Windows does, and we’re going to ignore that and deride you for playing AAA studio games that have anticheat that linux breaks or other software that doesn’t work on the OS. That’s your fault, we’ll be smug about it, and still recommend ditching Windows.

Conspiracies. This place acts like it has some superior thought or logic but as soon as something happens the conspiratards immediately make it a conspiracy and can’t be told otherwise regardless of logic - or accept a far more real but less exciting conspiracy. Everyone jumps on the bandwagon.

Lastly it’s missing the hobby and interest groups. It’s mostly memes and politics. I’d like to see more actual communities of interests and support for hobbies on the Fediverse rather than the constant grind of how f’d up the world is.

North Korea shill. Seriously. How absolutely dumbfuck do you have to be to actually believe there is even the slightest good in that regime? It hurts me personally that I'm Korean and that I've seen countless people, some I've met in person, who lost their families in that hellhole. And yet people who can't even spell Kim Jong Un or Juche are celebrating that prison of a kingdom.

Nothing about them are "left" or "progressive". To me, they're worse than MAGA shitheads.

Absolutely disgusting. Hope they all rot in North Korea.

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

My least favorite part is the toxic blue maga types, just painful to engage with in general and they're always trying to make conversarions about who you voted for.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Tankies, no niche subs; no gearheads here either.

Also you annoy the hell out of me with your constant anti-AI and pro-Linux bullshit.

Yes I use Linux. Yes I understand why you don't like AI. I'm not the biggest fan myself. I just don't make it my entire personality.

Not nearly enough cats.

People calling each and every one an extremist, fascist or nazi for no other reason than they are being blinded by their own inability to understand their counterparts viewpoint. As irony would have it causing themselves to become extremists, often proclaiming they wish voilence or sometimes even death upon other people.

I absolutely hate the amount of leftist infighting.

I miss polandball.

Tankies

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

The total lack of concern for easy on boarding of newbies. There's a lot of big talk about taking on social media monopolies but absolutely no interest in coordinating to actually accomplish that goal.

Sometimes I don't really want to get into a conversation about trans issues. I find the topic very prevalent on here, as if I've strayed into a sub by accident. Live and let live, and absolutely respect everyone's right to be whatever they want, but it's not a topic I can contribute to - and I certainly I don't want to upset anyone by wading into an emotive topic I have no experience, interest or knowledge on, so I'd rather just leave it.

I'm just saying that it's up there with LINUX as a prevailing topic, which I'm similarly disinterested in.

In the fediverse, the messy interoperability really bothers me. Sure I can follow Pixelfed users on Mastodon but I can only see the first 4 pictures if they post multiple. I can also follow Mastodon users on Pixelfed but I will only see their posts containing images.

This cross follow functionality should simply not exist unless it’s good (like between lemmy, mbin and Piefed) as it will frustrate users and cause them to leave the platforms.

Duplicate posts. Soooo many duplicate posts

I've run into or seen folks who can't walk away from a bad conversation.

People keep supporting socialism when it is painfully obvious they don't know what the word even means.

Not every positive thing the government does is "socialism"

Social programs instituted by the government are not "socialism"

What you're actually supporting is democratic socialism and has nothing to do with communism or socialism as a philosophy.

The lack of people. We need more people on the Fediverse.

The topics aren't as varied here, reddit pretty much has a subreddit for any niche community you can imagine.

I like the community more here though. People are generally supportive and there seem to be fewer unrestrained jerks.

It's a small echo chamber.

The niche communities are so fragmented. One post every few months or just abandoned compared to hourly posts on reddit, examples like gaming subs for specific games.

Group think: I rarely comment here because of that..

I still don't understand how to navigate the ins and outs of Lemmy and I've been here since RIF was killed

Everyone complains about it being empty and not many want to do anything about it. I'm not sure if this is even because of the user number, because I've been on forums with just a few users that were very active. It often seems like too many people here are waiting for a large influx of users so that others can do the posting. Also people try waaaay too hard to copy Reddit 1:1. They have this one very specific community with certain content and try to copy it here. If there was a subreddit for a 1998 version of an obscure computer game, they want this very same community to exist here. Instead of discussing said game in a more general community.

One of the most interesting aspects about the Fediverse is also the most confusing one in practice: the communication across different platforms. E.g. the ability to communicate from Lemmy to Mastadon is incredible. However whenever that happens, it's difficult to even realize that it's happening. It could an extremely useful feature, but currently, at least on Lemmy, it's just confusing.

In Lemmy itself I'm annoyed by (too) many things, but mostly they are related to our behavior and stubbornness. Nonetheless, with all its faults overall Lemmy is still my "favorite" social media.

People act like it's easy to get into and conceptualize fedi. I don't have a problem personally but I have a very rare level of IT comfort for my field and it leaves me feeling very lonely in spaces like this. I even had to take a tech competency credit for my degree (I tested out of it because it was basically a checkbox that asked if I knew how to type but-)

What I miss most are the (physically) local communities. On reddit, there was a subreddit for my general locality, and the nearby big city, and several subreddits on different aspects of life (the music scene, the food scene, etc). I miss that - randomly finding an event or something interesting simply because I came across a random post.

I know it's a function of the fact that it's still (comparatively) early days, but I do miss it.

Lemmy? the politics.

the fediverse? I know I've said this like a billion times to the same five people who come on here, but federated platforms still ape the format of big social media platforms, and inherit many of their pitfalls. I want long-term discussion and human connection, not an endless waterfall of content that quickly gets swept away.

The instances wars.

That a lot of people can't help themselves but read way more into the comment than it's actually saying. I can't count the times I've had to be so explicit and airtight for those bottom feeders to get it.

The AI hate is almost like medieval witch hunting. Someone says, “It is AI” (which translates to “witchcraft and the work of Satan”), and the rest seem to run and grab their pitchforks and torches, ready to burn the author at the stake.

Low turnout, mostly

The extremist idiots. Entire lemmy.ml is incredibly disgusting bunch of losers.

Anytime any question about age of consent comes up there's a lot of really creepy responses. Really really creepy.

People complaining about not enough variety when they don't post in those niche communities they talk about

Blocking people is just the same as muting them. I prefer people I block to not be able to see or interact with me ever again.

the Nazi-bot repost spam. So fucking tired of seeing twit-shit here

Reddit is full of different people with different backgrounds sometimes arguing in a toxic way about politics when it’s somewhat relevant, on a centrally censored platform

Lemmy is mainly an echo chamber for nerds almost always arguing about politics in a very toxic way on a federated extremely censored platform

My main complaint is the bad search system of Lemmy. You can only search for community but not specific topics using specific keywords.

The people.

No matter where I sign up, the server eventually shuts down and I have to migrate all my subscriptions and lose any posts I’ve contributed.

Look out, lemmy.world. I’m on this one now.

People who post Ask Lemmy threads then delete them (or their whole account) a day later.

Probably the federated nature of it... i know the whole point of it is decentralisation but with the likes of reddit or discord at least you could attempt to have all your content salted or deleted (whether it actually is is another story) from a single server. Knowing anything and everything you post on here will stick around forever no matter what you do, by design, makes me uneasy.

Not enough artists posting their weird shit. Analogue Nowhere rules but i need more

The thing that concerns me the most about federated content, is that a malicious actor could post something horrible/illegal (CSAM as the obvious example) and that gets replicated across the instances. Now those instances are "hosting" the content and could be held liable for it. A major corporation can pay lawyers to say the content was user posted and they are not responsible (happens all the time) but your average Lemmy admin does not have the same resources to defend themselves.

No particular complaints regarding the people or topics, but I wish we could do more than just up or downvote a post. In other online communities you can 🤣, or ❤️, or even 🤡 a post and that makes the experience much more enjoyable IMO, lol.

Concern trolling about the fediverse or lemmy.

Everyone on Lemmy has a tiny penis and severe personality disorder. I blend in too much.

but lack of women is not one of them.

See now this is a lie, at least if you filter by certain subreddits lol.

The last time I was on that slopfest of a site, r/Gaming was filled to the brim with posts that all followed the title of "Playing X game with my female SO" and a photo that in no way showed the SO.

So I know for a fact everyone was lying that they had a SO to play with lmao.

My least favorite things about it aren't really specific to lemmy. It's just the victimhood/doomerism culture here, that generates a ton of hateful angry commentary and the witchhunt mentality of so many of the users is revolting behavior.

But I'm not angry at the world and using lemmy to cope I guess. Like OG reddit, I mostly want to use lemmy to read interesting commentary on interesting events and stories and try and learn something, or articulate and add new POV to discussions. Unfortunately the cultural at large... hates this and sees all arguments/perspectives as a zero sum game where anyone who isn't confirming/supporting them 100% must also be denying them.

I also don't get the endless moralizing. I liked a lot how early reddit wasn't full of moralizing types, and I really hated it when those types of people gained traction and started playing comment police.

This only applies to people left from centrism (progressivism, anarchism, socialism...). "Wokes", "liberals", "tankies", I'll put them all as leftists in this text.

What is your least favorite thing about the Fediverse or Lemmy?

Lemmy. That interest in politics and critical thinking in general end when we arrive to topics do not concerning the life of the average lemming.

News about technology? Oh, yes, capitalism is wrong and Google is ruining this and let's do that... Feminism? Meh. Antiracism. Anticolonialism. Humanities defense? Whatever.

Of course, why would women or POC or the third world or non-STEM things would interest a bunch of first world STEM white men? Empathy or congruence with leftism? What's that? (sarcasm)

And it's tiring that you see how much time they spend talking about U.S. politics or online privacy, but not a thought can be put when you point out a non-privileged problem. I've even seen people get downvoted for saying something they posted or said was problematic.

In my region, leftists often separate completely from these spaces because of this. I don't want to, I like it here and, overall, my experience is positive and enriching. But yeah, this is one of the worst aspects of Lemmy in my opinion.

I haven't picked up my knitting in ages, but I guess I could...

I do kinda miss having a total karma count. Not that it ever really meant anything, but number go up is fun

Can't completely delete a post or comment.

Real people man. REAL PEOPLE!!!

Zionists

Not enough users.

small user base.
while i can deal with it,it kinda sucks the userbase is small.

Few users. You would notice a very big difference if there were more as you see the number of posts and comments.

Russian propaganda

The clashing ideologies makes it hard to gain traction for the fediverse. Since no one ever agrees on things, it ironically turns into the politics people complain about with the republicans vs democrats always being at a stalemate.

My main frustration is that the majority of instances are hosted in privacy-hostile jurisdictions.

Lemmy doesn't have this problem, but mastodon needs algorithms. Otherwise, discovery is more difficult and you must be around at the same time people of interest are either there or being boosted. People leave thinking it's boring.

Some, not all, Lemmy World mods

Fewer places to talk about fun things.

The incessant spamming of infographics by innerworld@lemmy.world.

They are mostly from voronoiapp.com, which the user seems to have a financial interest in.

The data often appears outdated or AI hallucination filled.

It would be good if this user disclosed their commercial interest in voronoiapp.com, the level of bot usage in their posting, and the level of AI use in the data collection and infographic creation.

I've seen several users block them based on the misinformation portrayed.

* As an example, this post I am replying to is bookended by 2 infographic spam posts from innerworld.

Tankies and random Ai stans once in a while.

Tankies with incoherent ideology, "AI is bad, except if I self host a FOSS version that's just as bad for the environment as the corpo one, then it's good actually"

I like the Voyager app, it helps integrate with piefed and has a lemmy community discovery feature, however I get this weird delay where communities appear blank the first time I land on them.

Haters recently on here. Much more blocking necessary than half a year ago or so

Tankies and neutral voters

I have a question: for those of us who aren't tech-savvy, is there a way to get away from the Material Design UI? As a designer, I absolutely hate it! I tried playing around with the settings but it still looks too Google-ish for me. I find it boring, rigid, and oldfashioned. When I open the app, I don't feel 'excited' to browse through the app. I want to feel compelled into clicking a button, upvoting/downvoting, sending a reply comment, and so on. I think if the UI was made to look more fun, it would attract a lot more users. Part of the experience of an app is the appearance and interactivity.

Tankies and anarchists.

To many communists.