Lemmy is a decentralized platform that uses ActivityPub to offer an alternative to Reddit, but I’ve come to the conclusion it’s lacking serious development.
As I’m not a software developer myself, I cannot contribute to it’s development and therefore my critique is obviously unfair to sone extent: who am I to point out what’s wrong with Lemmy?
That said, I’ve decided to return to Reddit for now. The reason are at least three issues that I think should be fixed ASAP, but aren’t.
(1) No way to migrate communities or user accounts.
This is crucial IMO, as an instance administrator can suddenly decide to quit an instance, remove communities or stop updating the server. Most if not all administrators are volunteers working with donations, so there’s really nothing one can demand of course. But without a possibiliy to backup and migrate accounts and communities, there’s nothing you can do if a server has frequent issues.
Again, I don’t blame administrators. And yes, I know it’s possible to setup your own instance, but the fact is that most people don’t setup their own instance.
Mastodon does offer migration from one instance to another and I think Lemmy should offer it ASAP.
GitHub issue #3057
(2) No way to block or delete direct messages (DMs)
Every Lemmy user can start sending you DMs and there’s nothing you can do about it. As long as you don’t mind DMs, that’s fine of course. But I don’t want to receive them. Moreover, apparently people are receiving offensive DMs or spam, but it’s impossible to delete it without an administrator getting involved.
Allowing an account to DM you is one thing, but people sending you DMs without asking for them is really annoying. Not being able to delete them is taking it up even one more step.
Github issue #3640 and #3629
(3) Deleting user accounts
You can’t. Yup, that’s right. It’s apparently impossible to delete a user account.
Now this is plain stupid. I’ve decided to quit Lemmy for now, but had to resort to deleting every post and comment by hand first only to discover today it’s impossible to delete your user account. To be clear: I haven’t tried it yet, so this might be instance related. That said, one would say this isn’t rocket science, but it’s awaiting a fix for over a month now. But again, I’m not a developer so this might be a very difficult bug to fix.
Overall, IMO Lemmy isn’t a very well thought through platform. Development is slow and issues like migration tools still aren’t available.
My suggestion to the Voyager developers would be to invest time in the development of Lemmy first before putting in more time developing Voyager. It’s a really nice PWA and I hope the native app works out, but bottom line Lemmy currently isn’t up to it’s task yet IMO. There are too many issues laying around for too long.
Again, that’s easy for me to say as I don’t have the skills to contribute to the development in a sensible way. But for now, I’m returning to Reddit in full awaiting further Lemmy development.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
Did you review the Patreon page? I’m not interested in having my name displayed. I’m interested in having the developers take a certain direction.
Donating for hardware (like donating to Lemmy instance administrators) is also completely different.
But donating to some group of developers without being able to influence the direction of development really feels like a money pit to me. I’d rather spend my money on charities. Access to dev chatroom is the closest you can get.
My point with regard to Voyager is: there’s no point in building a beautiful house (because Voyager is very good), if you know the foundation of the house is missing.
And specifically the lack of migration tools is a very fundamental issue IMO. Yes, it might be developed in the future. But it might also take years, who knows.
Mastodon still doesn’t allow quote posts (some clients do though) because quote-tweets (or should I say quote-Xs?) can be used in a toxic way. Development promised to implement them in the back-end months ago, but it still isn’t possible. Searching is also absent on purpose. Those are fundamental issue that block further growth of Mastodon IMO. But that’s obviously just my opinion.
That’s why I think Voyager devs should spend time on Lemmy development IMO. Without a fundamental tool to migrate accounts and communities, there’s really no point in spending time on Voyager features.
I think most Lemmy users haven’t experienced an instance administrator suddenly quitting. Think through what would happen to your community if that happens. It’s gone. That’s what happens. Unless you decide to host your own instance of course, but try and get users attracted to it.
If you don’t want your name associated with the project you can donate anonymously with crypto. You don’t have to give up your identity to do that. If you want to affect specific change in a project you can set an open source bounty.
I.e. https://app.bountysource.com/teams/lemmy/issues?tracker_ids=126011972
I personally donated to the Lemmy general fund because they got us here and I’m sure they’re keenly aware of the points of friction and they’re working on them. So I’m willing to have faith in them. That’s why we’re here because the communities on the whole good trying to improve itself.
That’s not the point.
The donation page ‘rewards’ those with a mention, but doesn’t allow development in a certain direction.
You give money, but those who receive it get to decide what they do with it. Look at the GitHub page and check for yourself what is being done with that money.
Again, it’s their choice, but I think they should focus on much more fundamental issues. If the foundation of your house is missing, what’s the point of adding fancy woodwork to the outside? Or donating to a project where people decide they want to spend it on fancy woodwork while leaving the foundation problematic.
That’s the core of open source. People find an itch to scratch. And they tend to scratch their own itches. The open source bounties are a way to encourage people to go outside of their toy problems. Though in many respects the way to get something implemented well is to implement it poorly and then through annoyance and sheer willpower someone will fix it properly. In a few years. Maybe
This is really good news is because Lemmy has had explosive growth recently that’s a lot of people with a lot of itches. Which is going to drive a lot of attention and hopefully a lot of development. And we’re seeing that with the surge in Voyager development.
I agree with you that there should be a way to donate or pay someone to develop or implement a certain feature. Or even have a link on the donation page that says “this money is being donated for X feature “ . That way if a developer wants that cash they have to go after that issue/problem.
Also all three problems that you listed in your original post are serious flaws in my opinion. But for me personally I still won’t go back to Reddit, but I can see why you might feel the need to head out and wait for the issues to get resolved.