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.
If you are not a benevolent dictator or core contributor of the project, I think you cannot directly dictate what should be done. But you can always vote which should be prioritized first.
Things you can do are
For me, none of the issues are deal breaker for me.
Of course, but that’s not the point of this post.
Imagine setting up a community, having thousands of subscribers and the administrator of the instance your community is hosted on pulls the plug.
And yes, I know people can host their own instance (see OP). But that won’t happen.
I understand your frustrations on lack of features you need.
The first one you quoted is not to point out your inability to dictate the direction. It is for the suggested actions I want to make.
I work in software industry. To my understanding your analogy to foundation and house is spot on but there is some major flaw. After building the house the foundation cannot be redone. In software, in this case API and clients, they can be changed anytime.
Technically, Lemmy server is backend + frontend and done in Rust programming language. Voyage is frontend and done in Typescript and ionic. To come back to your analogy, your suggestion is like asking interior designer to do structural engineering. (aeharding could be proficient in both frontend and backend but I don't know)
If you have the extra resources to donate to charity, you could do one of my suggestions instead. It will make more work done for both Lemmy and voyager app. This is just my opinion.
As far as I know Lemmy has been created some years ago and most of us knew it now because of reddit API changes. Lemmy is not feature complete as existing commercial one. The voyager app also is not feature complete. A lot of people are working happily and free for both Lemmy server and clients. So your opinion and suggestions to emphasize on Lemmy server dev is not very popular (at least I could say that seeing your downvotes).
P.S. you drop a lot when you quote me.