Lemmy was architected by people whose philosophical intentions are out of alignment with the software they cloned.

That system was designed to invite as many idiots as possible, to bait as much engagement as possible, with virtually no controls on quality or intelligence.

Well congratulations Lemmy, you've made the next Reddit. There's no reason to be here, it's just a pile of morons for the most part.

The tankies are far and away the largest problem. It's the number one reason why lemmy hasn't grown. Even when I signed up years ago from the reddit exodus every post I saw was heavily cautioned with "it's filled with tankies". And now every mention of it is being scrubbed for that reason. The second problem is the smaller size but see reason 1 for that.

Third problem is the sign up process being so excruciating. I understand it's to prevent bots but for every 2 bots it's preventing it's probably also preventing 1 actual user from signing up. I love this place despite the small size, because I can just sequester off all the tankies entirely on Connect, but if the creators don't realize they're actively standing in the way of growth by the actions they're taking and step away from all their moderation actions to focus on administration and development instead the outlook doesn't look too great.

The people on Lemmy are mostly weird obsessive leftists who have little interest in talking about anything else and disagree with each other for having nearly identical views in the grand scheme of things. I still like Lemmy but it can get tiring talking about anything especially if you mention something that people have decided is evil like AI.

for me, no option to follow posts / comments, mostly to see new comments / replies and create proper aggregation of responses, any opinion dynamics and so on — this makes everything very temporary / short lived

The negatives of a social site combined with the negatives of an unpopular social site.

The default home feed: out of the box, it puts too much shit in the face of newcomers.

Once filtered out, it's great but one must first learn to filter the noise out which, I'm pretty sure, is dissuasive to a lot of non-geek users like myself.

Number of users. Takes a lot of users to keep all the small niche communities alive.

Political skew. You don't benefit from being in an echo chamber. It will also drive away people you don't agree with politically but do enjoy the same niche hobbies. Not sure about you but I'm much more interested in my hobbies than politics.