Fediverse

there is nothing you can do about it

You can just post from a different lemmy instance.

4. […] certain communities that were supportive of Lemmy suddenly got locked behind a NSFW curtain […]

You got that wrong. That was a measure taken by these communities to demonetize reddit. Reddit doesn’t put ads on NSFW subs. Any profile that posts on an NSFW sub also gets their profile switched to NSFW afaik. Moderators got banned for these NSFW tags.

r/PixelDungeon is the only sub that I’m aware of that completely moved to lemmy. Withe the main mod and developer of the most popular fork moving to lemmy. The sub is still open, but it has a "bookmark" called "Lemmy" and a "link" called "Lemmy Community" that directly links to the lemmy community. The sub is still open and automod responded to any new post that the sub moved to lemmy … at least for a year or so, it doesn’t post that any more.

And there are some obvious down sides. To my knowledge lemmy has not implemented flairs or post tags, which get used excessively by some communities to categories and sort their content. [email protected] fell back to putting text tags into titles like "[DEV]" and "[OC]" and then use the search for this. But that is merely a work around. The sidebar links to these searches, but since instance-relative links are not a thing they are fixed links to lemmy.world.

The search itself is still inconvenient, because you can just "search this community". You always have to explicitly select a community to search it and have to enter the search term before selecting the community. Edit: that’s of course only true for the front-end (lemmy-ui) I use, dunno if all have that issue

I doubt regular end users will ever get warm with distributed federative networks. A lot of people already seem struggle with email. All tend to flock to a few big instances. For lemmy you also need some basic awareness of these systems. You can’t find everything and to expect that will always go wrong since you only search what your instance knows and never for everything. There are great projects like lemmyverse, but you need to know about them. People who don’t know about them will either just not find the communities they are looking for or they’ll start duplicate communities. The problem of not finding something is smaller on big instances but also more fatal, because their duplicate communities will displace the ones that were started on smaller instances but did not federate well yet.

And everything, the development and hosting, is solely carried on the shoulders of a few volunteers. That will always result in instances popping up and disappearing over time, with development speed varying depending on interest and free time the developers have.

The biggest selling point is not to replace reddit but to be connected with the rest of the activitypub fediverse. That you can see peertube channels as communities here. That mastodon users can comment on lemmy posts eggcetera

Reddit 100% was censoring and shadow banning any kbin or lemmy mentions.

I wouldn't even be surprised if reddit actively promoted or even creates negative comments. There was a precedent of people abandoning Digg so they were clearly very aware and afraid.

At the end of the day it's impossible to tell with these incredibly opaque networks. It's even hard to confirm comment visibility as Reddit employs data fudging and shadow banning.

Just another reminder that nothing any closed source social media says should be trusted, ever.

I definitely avoided Lemmy the first go-round with the API fuckery because it seemed from the outside like basically just a tankie protest Reddit in a similar way to how Voat was just a neo-Nazi protest Reddit. To the Lemmy devs' absolute credit, they don't push new users toward any of those, though.

I thought one day after having had a Mastodon for some time that I might not have given Lemmy a fair shake, so I went back and ended up finding that most instances are basically normal Reddit fare but honestly less shitty than Reddit proper (there's a trade-off that posts are less frequent and that small, niche communities can attract unwanted attention by having their posts almost immediately show up in 'all').

I don't get the hate against the lemmy devs tbh, they have their (perhaps controversial) political views but they leave everyone that's not on their site alone and it feels like they develop lemmy pretty impartially

sure they might ban you off ml but that's their site and they get to do whatever they want with it, just like every other instance

i mean network effect is a thing i guess but that's not as important on lemmy where there are usually similarly large communities about generic things on most major instances

Alledgedly?

Marxist Leninst is a nice way to put it, they support Putin, Xi. Zhedong and Stalin.

Thankfully as you say, it’s FOSS with free federation and defederation. Admins only have control over lemmy.ml.