Lemmy is a decentralized platform that uses ActivityPub to offer an alternative to Reddit, but Iāve come to the conclusion itās lacking serious development.
As Iām not a software developer myself, I cannot contribute to itās development and therefore my critique is obviously unfair to sone extent: who am I to point out whatās wrong with Lemmy?
That said, Iāve decided to return to Reddit for now. The reason are at least three issues that I think should be fixed ASAP, but arenāt.
(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 thereās really nothing one can demand of course. But without a possibiliy to backup and migrate accounts and communities, thereās nothing you can do if a server has frequent issues.
Again, I donāt blame administrators. And yes, I know itās possible to setup your own instance, but the fact is that most people donāt 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 thereās nothing you can do about it. As long as you donāt mind DMs, thatās fine of course. But I donāt want to receive them. Moreover, apparently people are receiving offensive DMs or spam, but itās 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 canāt. Yup, thatās right. Itās apparently impossible to delete a user account.
Now this is plain stupid. Iāve decided to quit Lemmy for now, but had to resort to deleting every post and comment by hand first only to discover today itās impossible to delete your user account. To be clear: I havenāt tried it yet, so this might be instance related. That said, one would say this isnāt rocket science, but itās awaiting a fix for over a month now. But again, Iām not a developer so this might be a very difficult bug to fix.
Overall, IMO Lemmy isnāt a very well thought through platform. Development is slow and issues like migration tools still arenāt 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. Itās a really nice PWA and I hope the native app works out, but bottom line Lemmy currently isnāt up to itās task yet IMO. There are too many issues laying around for too long.
Again, thatās easy for me to say as I donāt have the skills to contribute to the development in a sensible way. But for now, Iām returning to Reddit in full awaiting further Lemmy development.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
I have re read their comments and I donāt see where they said they havenāt tried. I see the spot where they said the button exists but thatās not the point (which implies they see the button and have tried it but it doesnāt work for them).
They say this in their initial post, but do not state why they believe this is the case š
Itās a known issue:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1637
The point Iām trying to make clearly isnāt understood.
What I read are lots of Lemmy fans that donāt think through the lack of migration tools or blocking DMs are serious shortcomings and it obviously makes no sense to continue developing a front end if these arenāt fixed first.
But apparently many people think thatās very logical.