The tankies

Smaller user base. It is both good and bad but the community for my city is dead (probably there were only like 8 of us on here).

Am old enough to know from experience that the early people on any platform are the computer geeks so expect the tech communities to thrive first - but as someone else said, music communities die, sports, arts, things that are pretty widely popular. Honestly happy with the slow and steady growth of the !cocktails@lemmy.world so if it's an indicator, the general interest people are joining just not quickly but some must be sticking. I would guess at some point it will be perfect then too big but who knows?

Personally I also miss the nonsexual nudes threads like nakedprogress and normalnudes. Again that's a lack of users issue, you need a lot of people willing to post, to have even a few willing to post nude.

I have trouble finding um what are they called here... Communities?... for the subjects I'm interested in. When I search, all I find is old posts or unrelated posts.

That's my biggest problem

Duplicated fragmentation

The negatives of a social site combined with the negatives of an unpopular social site.

As everyone has pointed out, people and content. Its good in some ways since not every post is drowned out with one thousand replies nobody will ever see, but at the same time, you're not getting much of anything at all sometimes. Not even very niche ones either. Even groups that represent entire states has limited info or replies still. If it can grow to that size and see some more unique and local content more I think even that would be a much better place for it to be.

Not enough people for even slightly niche communities. Wanna talk about smash brothers ? 732 people, only 2 posts in the last month.

This is why people still use reddit on the side.

Duplicate communities posting the same content over and over again.

Communities are tied to an instance. How many communities will die because lemm.ee is shutting down? There is a slightly mad rush to migrate communities already.

Lemmy should have used usent style naming for communities.

I may not understand how all this works but the very first page is mostly stuff that is 24 hours old or older. Maybe I am sorting it wrong or something but looking for the latest news is not easy. There should be a way from things that are older than 24 hours to fall off the front page. Also something like reddit enhancement suite would be nice.

Same as with every other social media ... the people.

lemmy.ml and its admins being the developers at the same time.

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.

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)?