Instances going down forever. - kbin, even though its not lemmy, had a more appealing UI to me and my little brother. We're on fedia now, but I only really use it to lurk when Lemmy.world won't load randomly. I don't think he even uses it at all anymore.
De-federation. - Beehaw caused several other people I know IRL to go back to reddit within a week. The timing was so perfect to wreck the API boycott that I'm almost convinced the Beehaw mods work for reddit. "Everything was broken" and now lemmy is dead and gone forever in their eyes, some even assuming the whole thing is literally gone now. They're not willing to try again.
When the reddit exodus happened, Lemmy was flooded with copycat communities for every popular subreddit. That's fine with me. But what's not fine is that very few of these communities use the same posting rules (if any at all) so they're homogenized. Like what is the difference between nostupidquestions and asklemmy?
I have another one that's not specific to Lemmy but absolutely applies: meme "communities" where it's all reposted content. I used community in quotes because these communities/subreddits/Instagram accounts are just....meme archives. You'll find the same shit in every single meme archive on the internet. It feels like it's less about sharing and more about having the biggest bucket.
Like what is the difference between nostupidquestions and asklemmy?
On Reddit at least, NSQ was supposed to have a "well, that might seem a stupid question" gist to it. But I agree that nowadays on Lemmy they are the same.
As much as I hate what reddit has become, it was a LOT less of a problem over there. And despite its reputation for having power tripping mods, the communities with strictest rules were almost always the best ones
A well-moderated community is a good community online. Self policing doesn't work when it's thousands of strangers