What should we be doing, individually, to increase Lemmy's userbase?
First and foremost, before the usual argument happens, I know that more is not necessarily better.
Having said that, it would be better if lemmy's userbase were much bigger. There are many, many, interesting communities that are basically dead. We need a bigger userbase to drive some content to those communities.
If person A wants to discuss topic X, but there are barely any people with whom to discuss topic X, person A will go back to the usual for-profit corporations to do just that. This is obviously not good, for obvious reasons: just look around.
And an equally important point: for profit services, such as reddit, need to die. The userbase create the content and a select few get rich from it? Fuck them.
So the question is:
- In your opinion, what can we do to increase the userbase?
139
Comments121
Less politics, less news, less "I'm mad about this so you should be mad about it too" rage posting/armchair activism, less "ist's and ism's". Less preachy shit about capitalism bad, communism good (or maybe .ml should just be blocked by default?). Less bitching about Reddit (I swear, I've heard less about friends' exes than some people bitch about Reddit here). Less "hurr durr power tripping mods" circlejerking.
More content about cool stuff, hobbies, amazing feats, movies, books, TV shows, etc.
This place has much of the latter but it's completely overshadowed by the former to the point you have to almost dig for it. Even blocking the overt news, politics, and political "humor" communities, it still seeps in to comics and memes and unrelated communities.
There's still plenty of good in this world, but you'd never know it from looking at what's always topping the feed here.
And a new user checking this place out is going to be immediately hit in the face with all of the former and probably not even see the latter.
Programming.dev has been hiding a lot of those kind of communities by default, others could as well:
https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/
But even with that fairly substantial hide list, I agree, we do drown in news and politics.
Ooh, nice. +1 for your admin team. Maybe my instance would consider doing something similar. It is a topic-based instance after all.
There are certainly plenty of communities that aren't dedicated to doomscrolling. They do need more activity though, plain and simple. I can't single handedly solve the issue of the All feed having so much of that, but I do try to regularly contribute to communities that are more varied, and I suggest to you and other users to do the same. Lemmy is a much smaller userbase and can't rely on the same proportion of users to contribute content like reddit.
Here are just a few communities I like to visit regularly, and contribute to any time I have a good contribution that aren't full of doomscrolling content.
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
Yep. When I visit Lemmy, it tends to feel like a dark place. I don't think news and politics should be dialed down to zero, but the overall negativity here is a bit heavy, and likely a deal-breaker for many exploring Lemmy for the first time.
For comparison to another decentralized social media platform: Nostr generally seems like a pretty positive place. The people tend to be friendly, and it's quite common to see them saying "good morning" to each other for seemingly no reason (aside from having a nice morning, I suppose). Conversations generally seem civil and mature. Unfortunately, there's LOT of Bitcoin stuff to wade through over there.
People post politics to communities that have rules against it, and the mods do nothing about it. Lemmy needs moderators who do their jobs. The political issue is a moderation issue.
I see a lot more shitting on .ml than on reddit. I think that's what needs to stop. If you don't like it, fine, use another instance.
.ml is a default instance...which is filled with tankies. It literally turns people away. The devs wanna have their own little tankie instance is fine but gaming the system to make it appear as an instance to join like 95% of the time is going to drive people away.
That is what subscriptions and the local timeline are for. The "all" should show whatever is getting the most attention.
The issues you are seeing are due to the small userbase. With a bigger userbase, your local timeline would be fuller. With a bigger userbase, you would be able to see plenty of content in non-meme communities and non-politics community.
"All" is what new users typically see. Or see immediately after clicking from "Local" if that's what the instance is set to default to. New users do not have any subscriptions, and if they're just browsing as guest, they literally can't subscribe or do any kind of curation.
First impressions are important. Someone comes here brand new and the first impression is typically that of an angry mob.
So to get a bigger userbase, the "default, guest experience" needs to provide a good first impression. This....preachy/angry/politics/news flood is highly likely to just turn them away and not even bother trying to curate to find the good bits.
I agree. First impressions are important. Perhaps there could be some "click here to change timeline" in the UI?
But again, this is mainly an issue due to the small userbase. With a bigger userbase, the memes and politics would not be so prevalent, hopefully. We would have smaller, text-based communities taking some of the attention.
You seem to be ignoring the problem, which is that the default guest experience of lemmy will filter out all the people who would solve the problem. "Increase the user base" only helps if the users who join aren't depressed doomers.
You could mitigate the problem of the small userbase with our current userbase, by just, for example, posting more of type X and less of type Y. That would be one answer to this post: what can one do, individually, to increase the userbase.
Honestly, I think we have way too many communities. Cull them back to a small set of fairly broad communities: Arts, Tech, Politics, etc. Once those are active enough, then start to subdivide as the sub communities grew to a sufficient size to self-sustain.
What happened instead, was people tried to create all the same communities that reddit has, without the people to sustain them, and now it looks like a ghost town.
I agree with this. Leads to communities being drip fed and having small user bases where eventually most people (who are not committed) just end up back on Reddit.
So how many communities should there be exactly?
Well I think that’s the wrong question to ask. I believe it’s probably best to get a handful of communities with a strong user base and encourage more people to come before we start slowly expanding out to more niche communities.
Take 4chan for example. To this day, I believe there’s less than 25-30 boards. Everybody just funnels down to one of some 30 odd communities, and they post their thread there.
For Lemmy, we have so many different fediverses and then on top of that there’s communities within each fediverse! Theres multiple ones for news, and politics and technology and memes. And I understand that is the appeal of being decentralized but it also means we never really amass numbers for communities. So, with that in context, I think it would be smart to encourage a strong user base in maybe one fediverse or assortment of communities before spreading out.
When you have a lot of small niche communities without a large population, there’s just no recipe to keep that community afloat unfortunately.
I mean I run [email protected]. It's only active because of me. I make up the majority of the posts. But when I do post, I get activity.
About tree fiddy
...It was about this time I realized the other poster was about 8 stories tall and was a crustacean from protozoic era.
This is true. During the big migration wave to Lemmy about 3 years ago, a lot of people came over and started niche within niche communities with the idea of making straight up 1 for 1 copies of very niche subreddits. I've even inherited moderation on some of them.
I think the best way forward is to try and backfill by posting a majority of content to some of the more main communities, and then crossposting to the more niche ones. This makes the more general and I think more important foundational communities active, and it gives a trickle of content to the already existing niches. Not being afraid of crossposting and then in general posting more is a good answer.
I personally dislike the cross posting in lemmy, as it results in seeing the same post 3-4 times in a row, which is kinda annoying as well. I believe piefed does it better (dunno if anyone can confirm that?).
This is true that crossposting is messy, but I think it is the best current solution. Crossposting means it is more likely to show up on the feed of somebody only subscribed to one of the communities, which might remind them that the community exists. Crossposting also means that when somebody stumbles upon a community it at least has the appearance of a pulse.
Is this the right place to discuss PieFed? I think PieFed did the cross posting and fragmented communities problem nicely. You can create your own feed too.
It's part of the same family, so I don't see why not.
I've not experienced piefed first hand, but from what I heard it joins Cross posts somehow? Lemmy you can create your own feed by subbing to communities, is piefed different?
Yes, it collects all the replies in one post, if the OP's been cross posted to different communities, and it only shows the post title once, so it doesn't overcrowd your feed. You can submit to communities to create your home feed like Lemmy, or there are Feeds that you can subscribe or create to your own liking, or there are Topics of collected similar communities, for easier browsing too. It has a more complicated structure than Lemmy, but I think it's worth it.
Cross-posting would be cool if the communities were hierarchically subdivided and automatically cross-post the most recent top 3 to a parent community. E.g. /c/art < /c/traditional_art < /c/classical_paintings
It would be much easier to discover and search new stuff you like.
That would be really cool. And kinda fits the "organic growth by subdividing" model
I run two niche communities but I'm fine with them being slow because I don't particularly care about the mod position - I just wanted a space to post two things I like
![email protected]
![email protected]
I think those are different in that you don't need discourse. You can post away, and if no one responds its not a big deal. But other communities, especially ones that people might go to for help or advice, getting zero responses to a question is spirit crushing.
Good point, and true.
As a user, It would be nice to be able to consolidate.
Ripping communities away from moderators to merge them is going to drive them away.
Yeah, the ship has largely sailed. But also, there are lots of communities that are empty and also functionally unmoderated, so some could be removed.
Unmoderated is different. Many aren't though, even if low activity.
Does become a bit of a philosophical question though doesn't it: Is a community really moderated if it has zero activity?
Also, I somewhat object to the framing of "moderators owning communities". I don't own the community I mod, I serve it. If it was a ghost town, and closing it down would prevent people stumbling into it and wasting their time, I would be completely in favour of it.
Of course by inactive, I mean no activity.
I run [email protected]. 90% of the posts are by me. I forced it into having a presence. It however does get engagement when I post.
This is true for many communities.
I agree to an extent. The problem is that an interest in a specific topic does not translate into an interest in the broader topic. Personally, if we only had broad communities on the level you suggested, I'd likely not use Lemmy at all, because then I'd have to spend too much time scrolling past the majority of posts or adding filters.
I disagree.
The one of the major things that Lemmy lacks compared to Reddit is all of the smaller random hobbyist communities.
Those niche communities work on reddit because there is a huge userbase to keep them alive. If you create them here, you get an empty community that looks dead, which discourages people from posting.
Having an active "hobbies" community going first, and then later splitting off the "knitting" community when it's clear that there are lots of knitters means that you don't get empty dead communities.
You can't force the niche community into existence, it has to grow organically.
Honestly I'm happy the Fediverse doesn't have the Reddit user base. I'd rather try recruiting people from various forums on specific topics to the Fediverse. Like homebrewing (alcoholic beverages) is still happening in independent web forums that I think would be neat if they got federated, but I don't think they in turn are interested in a Fediverse user base.
Now that you say it, it would be nice having a "linker" between Lemmy and a web forum, like a log of the Lemmy threads.
Piefed has spme nice crossposting with anything activitypub. And integration with mastodon hashtags.
I think there are some web forum backends that support hooking up to the Fediverse.
I think the most valuable thing we can do for the fediverse is to contibute by posting in communities we care about, thus helping them be active, and engage in posts made by others in general. In short, don't lurk, don't be passive.
I saw this same thought posted about 2 weeks ago and it made me realise I posted lfew replies and scrolled a lot. That person suggested if people see a post with zero responses they likely scroll past (myslef included) but even if the post has 2 or 3 responses, people will be more likely to perhaps engage
I now respond more, even if like this response, it's just a +1 type response.
Yeah, I'm making up for my lurker years.
If more people adopt this strat we will enrich the fediverse (and naturally attract more people,) though I prefer a small userbase with quality discussion, but both require participation.
cultivate the niche hobby subs, thats really all that reddit still has going for it because it reached critical mass.
Yes. That is one of the things that keeps people coming back. I have been doing stupid stuff with Linux and posting it here hoping people will join and push it further.
has to start somewhere, makes one wonder how reddit caught on enough to become established.
iirc StumbleUpon took me to reddit for the first time, not really organic website discovery services now.
Honestly, not just the niche hobbies. We have no real community here that the masses can enjoy. I can't give a good nfl instance, NBA instance, etc. Most of the shit presented to me is autistic blah. While it's entertaining for a minute it's not something that I need to see all the time, and it's the biggest amount of posts I see. I'm about to go over to digg for a while because there isn't much here.
fucking is on plenty of peoples' minds all the time regardless of their job lol
also, sex worker solidarity!
Reducing the amount of doomsday content on the front page, which I'm trying to help out with by starting ![email protected]
Can I ask why a bigger user base equals better? I’d there a technical reason?
I think there are a huge amount of internet refugees that are now lost. I miss healthy topics, resources and niche forums. But for me they won’t come back because all that info will get scraped and infiltrated. So I question even if the numbers arrived would that equal genuine and contributing communities.
I like this place this size. I’d like more engagement but I think a lot of people are reassessing what they want from the internet and that’s that. We can’t force engagement we can see the result of that at Reddit.
I think people just miss their niche interest communities.
For example, I love Elden Ring, but ![email protected] hasn't had any new posts in almost a year. Meanwhile the Elden Ring subreddit has a bunch of posts just from the last few minutes.
Still not enough to make me go back to Reddit, but I admit it's something I miss and something that just can't be recreated without more people.
Yeh I think that too. But agree wouldn’t go back. I just have to be satisfied with more observing.
Please join us in the [email protected] community. Game specific comms are almost dead but some of us genre enjoyers congregate there.
Thanks, count me as a new happy subscriber!
To be honest, Elden Ring is the only Souls game I've played and so it's the only one of any real interest to me for now, but I am appreciative of the tags used in the post titles that allow me to filter out the content from other games I'm not interested in seeing. Glad to see content is alive somewhere!
Word on the street is that Elden Ring is a gateway drug :P.
I primarily used reddit for niche hobbies and fandoms that have no equivalent here. Small userbase * niche special interest = I might possibly be the only person on this platform who's into some of my hyperfixations.
With a large enough critical mass, more users can hopefully mean more shared interests to talk about.
If I want to read discussion about a new movie or game that all seems to be on reddit, so I guess the lesson is to try starting that sort of thing here and hope it picks up. With a smaller user base you have to accept that individual posts may not get any traction though. I do think having discussion other than Linux and whatever Trump is going on about this week would help to grow the platform.
Start posting!
Ive been posting way more here than I ever did at reddit, and mods dont delete my posts randomly or out of spite.
Honestly variety is the spice of life, and keeping up with the zeitgeist is half of why people like to be online. I think this is a very good point!
the biggest hurdle i see right now to expanding the threadiverse is how often people here are just absolute assholes to each other.
That tracks with every other platform though. I think the big hurdle is that it seems more complicated to get into since having independent instances is so different than everybody else.
Outside of get-popular-quick schemes:
Volunteer your time and expertise to make Lemmy better. Whether it's sharing secret recipes for free, or helping out newer users, all users need to contribute to make it a better place that people want to use.
Try to be welcoming and kind.
We should start making little comics about how people who aren't on Lemmy all go to hell and put them in random places.
Ok Rick James...
Cocaine’s a helluva drug
Leak the funhole.
Stay upprayed fam.
Thank you for sharing your leaky hole content.
Post More
Okayyy
Good job :)
Can we pool some money together and advertise somewhere or put stickers at coffee shops in big cities. Some of my other thoughts are to have influencers plug it, put adds on blogs especially hobby blogs and niche blogs if that’s who we’re trying to attract.
This would not be such a bad idea, honestly. Or just some small stickers that people place on their laptops.
However, I feel like we should see who comes on top, lemmy or PieFed. I feel like piefed might be our best option tbh. The lemmy devs don't seem to be open to ideas, not to mention their whole stance on politics.
Cool stickers go a long way.
More Star Trek memes! And more memes in general.
In addition, suffer some Reddit. Not the main pages, the niche groups. Name drop Lemmy in regular posts.
If you are active on other social media, have a channel people watch. Again, mention Lemmy.
hola, trataré de mencionar algo que me parece no sale o no se ve mucho como debate,
soy un usuario que leer bastante lemmy por varias razones, novedades, noticias, comentarios, revelaciones...
en mi caso particular pues por no conocer mucho ni poco el idioma inglés pues acudo constantemente al traductor incorporado de firefox, y con calma pues voy seleccionando hilos, debates y respuestas que bien interesan,
cuando se comenzó a gestar la expansión de lemmy hice la tecnica de responder en ambos idiomas, en original español y el bloque traducido en inglés,
¿es un problema que todo lemmy o mayormente sea solo en inglés? pues es un eterno debate complejo, si y no, en el caso de español por ahora instancias de lemmy son muy contadas, muy pocas y ya casi sin participación o seguimiento, ya ni menciono otros idiomas locales o regionales pero igualmente importantes como el catalán,
por eso ando en la duda que el idioma de acceso o la poca o nula facilidad de traducir hace o puede hacer que lemmy no se expanda mas, solo algunas apps externas y accesibles de android hacen posible la traducción con pulsar un botón, pero si me preocupa un poco "mucho" que este detalle de lengua está ahora "bloqueando" a muchos o miles y miles de usuarios que les gustaría participar, escribir, responder y ampliar el tema de cualquier naturaleza.
Hi, I'll try to bring up something that I don't think gets discussed much.
I'm a user who reads Lemmy quite a bit for several reasons: updates, news, comments, revelations...
In my case, since I don't know much English, I constantly use Firefox's built-in translator, and I carefully select threads, discussions, and replies that are of interest.
When the Lemmy expansion started, I used the technique of replying in both languages: the original Spanish and the translated section in English.
Is it a problem that all or most of Lemmy is only in English? Well, it's a complex, eternal debate—yes and no. In the case of Spanish, for now, instances of Lemmy are very few and far between, with almost no participation or follow-up. I won't even mention other local or regional languages, which are equally important, like Catalan.
That's why I'm wondering if the access language or the limited or nonexistent ease of translation is preventing Lemmy from expanding further. Only a few external and accessible Android apps allow translation with the touch of a button, but I'm quite concerned that this language issue is currently blocking many, or even thousands, of users who would like to participate, write, respond, and expand on the topic in any way.
I’d been thinking along these lines - even as an anglophone it feels like the fediverse user base is largely USA, UK, Canada, and Australia, with some representation for German and French speakers. To really get away from the dominance of the Western tech giants I’d like to see much more global representation, and that would mean not just trying to mirror how the Western social media platforms worked.
However, for auto-translation the onus may be more on app developers than instances, as it wouldn’t really be practical to keep translations in every language. Maybe there could be instances for particular languages and they provide auto-translation to one or two other languages?
@[email protected]
First step is to make sharing posts easier by integrating something like https://threadiverse.link/.
If I wanted to share your post with my friends, I'd send them the following link: https://piefed.ca/c/asklemmy/p/461864/what-should-we-be-doing-individually-to-increase-lemmy-s-userbase.
If my friends were also on Piedfed.ca, then all's fine. But if they're on a different instance and want to comment and/or vote on your post, then they're fucked. They would have to go on their home instance, look for ![email protected], and then search for your post.
I say friend, but this applies to literally everyone here except those who are already on Piefed.ca.
I agree, but at least on Lemmy they don't have to look for the home instance first. You can paste the url into the search there.
It looks like that doesn't work with the Piefed search? (Didn't use apps in both cases)
The main hurdle is onboarding. Normal people wont understand federation. All they know is Login with Google, that's it.
A couple of things that come to mind
waiting for more reddit purges? thats sadly is the only way. other ways, reddit just have all the communities that lemmy doesnt.
currently reddit is very careful about massive purges now, they are just doing background ones, even if they increased thier filtering and sensitivity of bot? detection. they want to avoid bots being to pervasive on site to make it seem like its mostly users.
Midnight rave.
Trying to convince people I know to join the Fediverse is like, well, it's a lot like trying to convince people to switch to Linux. They're not gonna do it and I'll look like a jackass if I talk about it too much.
If there was an easy way to grow this platform overnight, we'd be doing it. Reality is there's no shortcut, all we can do is continue building community with the people who are here and hope that we see some slow and steady incremental growth.
Best thing you can do is make your own communities for topics that we haven't already got one for.
Also going on reddit and just going "join lemmy join lemmy join lemmy" over and over again probably helps, right?
Plenty of people did just that, then came to realise that it's usually quite the job to keep their sublemmys running and build them up over time. Bot posts don't work very well, either. Hence all the dead communities across the FV.
A related issue is that the FV strongly needs people with more community-minded spirit than the typical Reddit user. IMO it's important to 'be the change,' and to try to help each other out as individuals, and help communities we appreciate. Being more of a 'lazy Reddit asshole who clutters threads with lame DudeBro jokes' isn't ideal at this point.
Nothing.
Twitter was fine until it got popular, as was Reddit.
First thing is gain enough support in the presumption that increasing userbase is a desirable outcome.
Chasing bigger numbers for bigger numbers sake is one of the biggest problems with capitalism
Honestly memes on lemmy are orders of magnitude greater than ones I see on reddit. If growing user base makes the memes more lame I don't know if I support it
Stay federated and up prayed.
you can link to posts and comments here on other platforms if they are interesting or funny or cool
you can also post your dingus on the NSFW one
I think instead of promoting Lemmy as a whole, promote individual instances separately (but evenly)
Absolutely nothing.
same. the bigger it gets the more ads you get.
Ads and idiots.
I think we have a good idiot ratio right now, let's not increase it.
We don't need more usebase, we've got perfectly good userbase at home.
Honestly it's a double edged sword. The tight-knit feel of Lemmy is really cozy, but with a larger user base it will allow for more posts/interaction on niche communities.
Post more sexy pictures.
honestly, the real answer
I don't think this site is for everyone. You need your own internal reason to use this site (anti-enshittification, banned from other places, or whatever). On a regular social media site, you log in, and you immediately are shown a feed of fun and interesting content. Unless you're like really into programming, Lemmy doesn't have fun and interesting content. Of the content that is here, people don't engage with it much, and it's poorly moderated (actual calls for death and abuse, weird sexual anime stuff, etc). Lemmy is also not easy to use or understand. Most people don't understand what an instance is, and why do I need to read paragraphs on federation just to use the site? The only way this place could compete with polished, plug-and-play social media is if the US continues getting so authoritarian that regular social sites become exorbitantly censored to a regular person's perspective.
It is possible to increase the userbase without inviting the whole world. Lemmy may have a bigger learning curve than, say, Instagram, but that is fine. Maybe not having people who can't understand how lemmy works is a good thing. There are, however, many many people who would understand how lemmy works that have not yet learned about it or have but are not using it. Those are the people to whom we should cater.
We should still, of course, improve the UI/UX as much as possible. Though I feel like Piefed is better for this. Lemmy devs are not receptive to suggestions, not at all. I tried. If the idea did not come from their heads, they reject it.
This is a good point. understanding a fediverse is a bit of a learning curve and not for everyone. Some support in this area…even just the sign up process is a bit daunting.
Biggest thing, make it easy to understand.
I STILL dont really get the fediverse. Ive had it explained to me multiple times and I'm still shaky on how to explain to a normie.
Reddit is easy. Fb is easy. Lemmy has to be easy or it will never work. Humans are above all lazy.
And, give them a reason to leave. Why would my friends leave reddit or x, where the content is? (They dont care about bots or fascism). Lemmy has way less content.
Just keep using it. Ask questions, post solutions, as time goes on they will be more relevant.
Post everything here.
Today I Learned is a good one for old info, as people post repetitive stuff all of the time, so when people look up an unusual fact etc.. They get brought straight to one of those.
DIY, Woodworking, hobbies etc. and all the main things that people want to look up.
I mean for me it was a recent decision to delete for-profit and algorithmic social media. But that was internally driven as I realised they were making me more miserable and I couldn't stomach the advertising anymore. But I've always failed to replicate that feeling in other people who are stuck in a mixture of sunk cost fallacy and boiled frog status, no idea how to do it consistently.
Mention and link to it on Reddit when it is especially relevant
Occasionally I'll tell one of my friends about it. I point them to one of my low-politics / low-tech feeds:
Post good content, post links to that content to people it would be desirable to have on here. Have enough other good content that they are inclined to stay.
For profit services don't need to die. Let the influencer morons stay on them so the rest of us don't have to deal with them and their idiot followers enshittifying another platform.
Don't.
I don't think that the current structure is set up for growth. The devs have stated that they don't see preparing for growth as a priority and we haven't seen the kind of mod tools needed for a larger audience.
I also don't see an onboarding process that has been created to explain to new users how a Federated Lemmy is different from Reddit.
Piefed is structurally further along here at coping with larger audiences.
I only came here when Reddit banned me, even though I knew about it for ages before that.
So we should get more people on Reddit to threaten violence against Nazis.
I talk a lot about Lemmy with friend and family, and I cross post Lemmy posts to Reddit (in fact, that’s the only thing I do on Reddit).
Bring it up at your local town hall; be sincere about what Lemmy is. Ask if there are any Reddit users then publicly shame them for using the platform.
You make a very good point. I myself have noticed sites like Lemmy.world are a bit of a ghost town compared to other forums. I think the main reason is that sites like Reddit are still more popular. And that's either because people started using Reddit when it was actually good and are clinging to nostalgia, or because people don't know that Lemmy exists. Or both. I recently saw a post on Reddit where someone claimed that Reddit is the only usable forum on the internet.
To answer your question: Convince people that Lemmy is what Reddit was trying to be back in 2006.
Lemmy is sort of crappy through its software decisions, similar to how Reddit is crappy but in some ways worse. There's not much we can do about that as users. Reddit also manages to paper over some of its crappiness through moderator interventions, while Lemmy tends to let crap slide. Crappiness = clickbait titles with no indication of what the link is about, lots of duplicate posts, etc. Lemmy adds the problem of fragmenting communities across instances. I think I heard that posts duplicated across multiple communities in a single instances will somehow be cleaned up in 1.0, which can help.
Anyway there's not a whole lot that users can do, except maybe launch some new instances or forks that don't suck as much.
Piefed fixes pretty much all of those questionable software decisions, though it does introduce a couple new ones of its own.