First of all I am super happy that such alternative exists but it’s far from perfect due to many reasons and this is why I think it’s not ready yet to absorb the influx of reddit users because many of them will just bounce off when they realize it.
My biggest gripes so far:
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Users are unable to block whole instances hence you either need to register with instance that already blocks unwanted instances (which is not perfect because it might block also those that you don’t want to be blocked) or you need to block manually every single community there or you will be exposed to lemmygrad or other tankie instances. That’s so basic feature I can’t find any logical reasons that was not a thing since day 1.
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Lemmy is one of the least privacy friendly (unless you just use throwaways and disposable mail like you should) service I have ever stumbled upon and while it’s partially due to how federation works it’s just a fact that even reddit did that better because it was way easier to nuke your account and all traces (including nicknames in deleted comments, which is not a case on lemmy).
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There is no possibility to migrate or backup your subscribed/favorited stuff or even move it to another instance (which somehow is possible on Mastodon), so you basically have to trust that your instance won’t disappear overnight. Obviously any site can disappear, centralized or not but there are bigger chances that some random Joe will decide to close instance without saying anything than reddit closing down overnight without letting you copy your stuff. That’s even more annyoing if you consider that instance admin can restrict you from viewing instances they don’t like, hence you would need to create account on another instance and resubscribe to anything manually which is far from perfect.
What are your views on that for the time being?
Sounds like a good feature, though not exactly a ‘disadvantage’, without a comparison. Is the comparison Mastodon? Reddit?
Could you expand on this? Is it just the deletion problem?
This took a while to get on Mastodon. Remember, the data’s not necessarily stored in a usable format (users don’t want a load of postgres in their download), and the devs need to be sure that nobody else’s data will accidentally get in there.
This is definitely a disadvantage in comparison to Mastodon imo. For example, there’s no reason for a general-purpose instance to defederate from lemmynsfw.com, but it would be nice if I could browse all and not have it be half porn without hiding all nsfw posts in general.
The features sound good, and judging by Lemmy, I imagine they’re coming, depending on how much free time the devs have.
This one’s trickier. The mods have mentioned both moderation and legal difficulties with nsfw instances. If something illegal’s posted, then whoever has the server would (verifiably) have a copy of that image and has been (verifiably) distributing it. Reddit probably managed to skirt these issues by a) being early, when the world was new, and laws were weak, and b) having the money for a legal team.
I wouldn’t want to be an admin trying to answer legal questions.