What are some valid criticisms of Lemmy do you hear from people who tried out the platform?

Not enough people around to discuss some more niche topics and hobbies.

It's too fractured, posts in one community on one instance have separate comments and interaction to the same post in the same community on another instance, even if you use crossposts properly, and it clutters up your feed with multiple of the same post

Too much focus on discussing the news and politics. And rarely is it an inspiring and new perspective. (Sometimes it is, though.)

As a non-US user myself, beside the lack of participation on Lemmy, I think the kind of replies and the instant escalation to this comment, in this very thread is a great example of why Lemmy can suck, hard.

The world, exactly like the Internet, does not end at the US borders.

And yep, even though many US citizens seem to be on the verge of slicing each other throats, it doesn't mean the rest of the world should behave the same. Lemmy users should still be able to discuss freely even between people of varying opinions, or even of completely opposite opinions.

If a post is deleted for any reason it nukes everything, even the comments.

I can't go back and view any comments that I was replying to or that I had saved, I can only see my own comment.

Not enough video game communities. I think that was a huge part of Reddits initial success. Even to this day I still search "Problem + /reddit" on google whenever I have issues in a game. Reddit often holds the core community off a video game. It's often detrimental to a games success to have a Reddit community. Lemmy has communities for some games, but they are mostly inactive or have only 10-60 users. So don't even have the latest patch notes posted.

Its always about one of two things:

Instances going down forever. - kbin, even though its not lemmy, had a more appealing UI to me and my little brother. We're on fedia now, but I only really use it to lurk when Lemmy.world won't load randomly. I don't think he even uses it at all anymore.
De-federation. - Beehaw caused several other people I know IRL to go back to reddit within a week. The timing was so perfect to wreck the API boycott that I'm almost convinced the Beehaw mods work for reddit. "Everything was broken" and now lemmy is dead and gone forever in their eyes, some even assuming the whole thing is literally gone now. They're not willing to try again.

Permanently Deleted

It's my own observation, but a lot of people on Lemmy are smug assholes, including many mods.

The politics is very left wing and very unwelcoming to any other viewpoint.

The default web interface is very poorly designed and looks uninviting. Sure, there are great alternative interfaces but people will be turned off before they could check them out. Also, it's usually the first thing you see when someone's sharing a link.

There not being an official app is also something that will confuse non-tech users.

Many instances have domain names that look invalid and/or like scam sites to non-techies. Dot world? Dot social? Dot [obscure country TLD]? There's also no guarantees that the domain will indicate that it's a Lemmy site. Both of these become problematic with sharing, as the default (? been a while since I've used the web interface) share function links to the poster's instance and not the community instance. A year and a half ago, the shared links section in my messenger was mostly a Reddit flood. Today, it looks like someone spilled alphabet soup.

When you block someone, all the subsequent comments made to that person's comment are also unable to be viewed.

When they post asking for help with Windows and get an entire thread of answers from obnoxious elitist wankers who couldn't even decide on a distro between them

The fact that many on the internet haven’t gotten past the largest hurdle, creating a Lemmy account.

We’re currently at 462k created accounts.

Can't filter out non-English communities. On any given day, I could scroll through my feed and a third of them would be languages I can't read. I wish I could, but I can't.

Permanently Deleted

Too many terrorist simps, too much mod abuse, too much disinformation, too many Tankies, discovery of communities is hard with how federation works and kinda requires third party apps.

Generally mods of the communities still suck to an absolute extent, not as bad as reddit but still nowhere near acceptable.

I hate not being informed of bans, and I think they are all permanent.

The syntax of linking to users, posts, communities etc. is hard to keep a mental grip on. I know they couldn't exactly copy reddit's u/ for users and r/ for subreddits, but ! for communities and @ for users isn't as schematic. I think it's why you see it used less than on Reddit. And if you start to type a username, and an autocomplete window pops up, it inserts that format in brackets followed by a URL in parenthesis. To the right of the text box I'm typing in, I see, and I'll approximate this as best I can:

Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world

asklemmy@lemmy.world

Neither has the exclamation point reminding you how to use that feature. My bipolar ex girlfriend had a more consistent UI than that.

Linking to posts and comments is just pure moon logic. Follow me here:

This Post is stored on lemmy.world, right? Where is the comment I'm currently writing stored? on lemmy.world, or sh.itjust.works?

@kibiz0r@midwest.social commented on this post, I'm going to use it as an example. There are two buttons next to their username. Both have the hover over tooltip "link".

The chain looking one gives me this URL: https://sh.itjust.works/post/27359355/14761082

The...fedigon? What's the name of the 5-pointed rainbow fediverse icon? looking one gives me this URL: https://midwest.social/comment/13230476

If I wanted to refer to kibiz0r's comment in some other thread somewhere else, which of those links should I use? I figure in most cases I'm addressing an audience of the entire fediverse not just my fellow sh.itheads, so why would I ever use the first link? What does someone from lemm.ee see when they click on either of those links? Do they get to see it through their own account on their instance, or do they get linked directly to another instance? This really breaks the idea of "one account, whole fediverse."

If you complain about a technical thing, you'll end up having to justify every square inch of your existence in order to prove your complaint isn't just user error.

Two examples from yesterday:

It can be hard to find the right community to post a link in. Figuring out the rules and knowing who's reading them (and sometimes what they're really about) might cause someone to give up. (Especially when people complain about 'this isn't the place for that' without stating the better alternative.)

That talklittle went to tildes instead, which, fair.

That it's not well known.

Nothing is deleted, just slightly obscured, and some apps don't even do that. Child porn, illegal revenge porn, hate speech, everything is stored forever.

What the hell I didn't even know this existed. I just chose all posts and thought I was seeing the aggregate content from every instance. Also, Seeing the usernames (with different instances on it), it made me believe everyone's interactions are saved and visible.