That is true. I made a post just now to gather suggestions for improving the website, please have a look and comment if you have any ideas: https://lemmyverse.link/lemmy.ml/post/41719890

There is nothing preventing apps from providing a registration flow. For example Voyager has it. I suppose the problem is again which instance to choose for signup. You can discuss this in https://lemmy.world/c/boostforlemmy or https://lemmy.world/c/lemmyapps.

As for multiple Lemmy apps being available: Most of the current Lemmy users came here in 2023 when Reddit locked down the API and killed third-party apps. Thats why a lot of apps are now available, and everyone can decide for himself which one he prefers.

Good point, I made a PR to use biased random sort again that we had in the past, so larger instances are always shown near the top.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/508

The logic it uses is to hide any instances with more than 30% of all active users to prevent centralization, just like you say. There are also some other filters like requiring at least 5 active users.

There is a “Join” button which goes directly to the registration page of the respective instance. Would it be clearer to rename this? Other than that I’m also happy to make improvements if you have concrete suggestions.

Edit: Made a PR to rename Join to Sign Up: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/509

The onboarding is way too complicated for the average user. A huge part of this is that there are 100 ways to do it. Before you even can start to do anything you have to investigate and then decide on what and how to do it. And even then there is no guidance at all, you are given options and then you can either go and do some research again or try them one by one. You lose at least 90% of the users here already. It doesn’t help that fediverse users try to downplay this issue.

The solution to this is that people should not recommend Lemmy, but a specific instance such as programming.dev (depending on the audience). The Lemmy software and join-lemmy.org are mainly targeted at potential instance admins, or those who are already familiar with the Fediverse.

After that you are told that your registration needs to be approved manually and that there is no notification about that so you have to manually check from time to time whether your are able to login or not.

This is wrong or outdated, Lemmy definitely sends an email once your registration is approved or denied (if you provided an email during registration). Worth contacting the programming.dev admins to change this line.

We have an open issue for this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5871

Good idea, thanks!

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/3757

Good point, I brought this up in the issue: https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/372

Ah, worth reporting this to Bridgyfed so they keep the existing formatting.

Edit: Done

Yes thats why I said it partly federates. The Bridgyfed issue is still open, so there are probably more changes needed.

For posts from microblogging platforms, Lemmy uses the first line as title. So make sure to keep the first line short, and put anything extra into separate lines (links, mentions, extra text etc).

In theory it should work, assuming that Bridgyfed federates the mention to Lemmy. Someone with a Bluesky account would have to test it.

The vote counter seems to be broken (it’s different on different Lemmy instances), is this the same issue as Mastodon not federating likes properly?

That is normal, for example if one instance has some users banned then their votes wont count. If another instance doesnt ban those users, it will count their votes as well. Besides user bans this can also happen with instance blocks.

I find it very questionable that you publish this sort of hit piece against Lemmy without even bothering to ask for a comment from our side. This is not how journalism should work.

Effectively you are blowing the complaints of a single user completely out of proportion. It is true that we didnt respond ideally in the mentioned issue, but neither is it okay for a user to act so demanding towards open source developers who provide software for free. You also completely ignore that this is an exception, there are thousands of issues and pull requests in the Lemmy repos which are handled without any problems.

Besides you claim that we dont care about moderation, user safety and tooling which is simply not true. If you look at the 0.19.0 release notes there are numerous features in these areas, such as instance blocking, better reports handling and a new moderator view. However we also have to work on improvements to many other features, and our time is limited.

Finally you act like 4000€ per month is a lot of money, however thats only 2000€ for each of us. We could stop developing Lemmy right now and work for a startup or corporation for three or four times the amount of money. Then we also wouldnt have to deal with this kind of meaningless drama. Is that what you want to achieve with your website?