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 too difficult to block huge swaths of things you’re not interested in. Like sports, or memes, or music. You block one community and 99 more about the same subject appear in your feed.

Adding some sort of Usenet-style organization or sublemmy tagging might help.

for me, no option to follow posts / comments, mostly to see new comments / replies and create proper aggregation of responses, any opinion dynamics and so on — this makes everything very temporary / short lived

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)?

Reddit is useless for questions. If you're a subject-matter expert in something, find the subreddit for it and prepare to be horrified.

I'm the main poster on [email protected]. Most popular post on the planet.

I guess people on Lemmy just don't like sports.

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.

Hell even [email protected] (as far as I can tell, the biggest one on the platform) only has like 10k subs, like a dozen posts today, and basically all of the posts were people just advertising music. Zero discussion.

Even for things i would think are big, the communities here are still vanishingly small. I joined reddit in like 2014 and even back then it was more popular than Lemmy is now

Two different instance admins banned me from couple of community without telling me for which post or comment of mine were they banning me for, haven't responded when I asked them why, and because of that I can't see images posted by users from those instances.

Edit: This is what I see

This is exactly why I don't use Reddit on the side. When I run out of content on Lemmy, there's no choice but to do something productive instead. Had to go 100% cold turkey on Reddit to make that work though.

You're misquoting him - that's bad faith. Whether or not you believe him is a separate issue. When you criticize someone for what they said, you should address their actual words - not your interpretation of them.

Misrepresenting what someone says is a textbook example of bad faith so doing that in a discussion about bad faith is ironic to say the least. What he actually thinks is unrelated to this discussion as it's about what he said. You'd call people out for twisting your words so hold yourself to the same standards.

But downvoting doesn’t mean that.

It doesn't?

At all.

Really? At all?

Not even sure how you got that idea.

Hmm. You mean you don't have perfect insight into other people's minds? Admittedly that's odd.

So yeah, you’re not making any sense here.

And you're coming across as the kind of sanctimonious interlocutor that I can't be bothered to answer properly.

You are appearing more and more bad faith, or just plain grossly ignorant, and willfully so... If you won't accept the truth, the truth that is being handed to you, with references, by other people, then prepare to not be part of this "echo chamber" for much longer...

Again, this discussion isn't about him. You said both sides have plenty of bad faith, which is wrong. In light of this discussion I'm beginning to see why you can't understand the differences, or just refuse to.

I am currently working on a report on vote manipulation and the early results are showing clear signs of the some most prolific .ml accounts participating in brigading and vote manipulation.

I see good discussions on

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Not really into music myself, I guess the issue might be that it's too generic? Even on Reddit I don't think /r/music was that busy, too many different genres

[email protected] only has 11 posts in the last 24 hrs and [email protected] only has 7...