Lack of granular privacy / profile control
“The lack of privacy controls … our profiles are public, and all our posts and comments are visible to anyone.” (
lemmy.toot.pt)
Users cannot choose who sees their profile history, comments, or posts.
Poor content discovery / lack of niche communities / limited diversity
“The platform lacks all the communities … There are no communities for games or music or sports or hobbies or movies or anything.” (
Reddit)
“Not nearly enough people to cover all the niche interest communities that Reddit does.” (
szmer.info)
Fragmentation across instances / duplication of communities
“Multiple communities dedicated to the same thing across multiple instances … causes confusion …” (
Popcar's Blog)
“There are duplicate communities: every instance seems to have their own version of each community.” (
Reddit)
Bad User Experience (UX) / usability issues
“Lemmy is losing so many potential new users because the UX sucks for the vast majority of people.” (
NodeBB Community)
“Simply using them is confusing … accessing remote subs is a complete train wreck.” (
Reddit)
Performance / reliability / scaling problems
“Slow and unreliable” is listed among cons. (
Slant)
“Servers go down … syncing/federation issues.” (
Android Authority)
Moderation, safety tools, and content-quality issues
“Moderation tooling is not adequate for removing illegal content from servers.” (
We Distribute)
Users report low content quality (memes, shitposts, agenda memes) instead of high-value discussions: > “The politics is always … or it’s toxic American hyper-partisan … The memes aren’t any better.” (
Reddit)
Search and archive weak/incomplete
“Search sucks … Lemmy isn’t.” (
szmer.info)
Lack of long-tail content archive.
Over-representation of particular content types (US-news, memes, agenda posts) and low content-quality
Users note: heavy US-centric news, lots of meme posts, little local news/events or regional content.
While I didn’t find direct sources for exactly “too much US news / no local events”, the broader complaint of “lack of niche interest/hobby/sports” covers this. (
Reddit)