Lemmy is a great piece of software and works well, although it has some limitations that will be partially improved with version 1.0.

Lemmy also has two major problems, one that isn’t related to Lemmy and one that is.

1. The first problem is that Lemmy doesn’t handle Activitypub groups managed by Friendica and NodeBB well. It’s unable to pick up NodeBB and Friendica posts in the wrong places, so you’ll never see any NodeBB or Friendica posts in the community timeline. Fortunately, it handles Piefed communities correctly, because they work with the same logic.
2. The second problem is related to Mastodon: this is effectively a design flaw in Mastodon. In fact, the top posts published by Lemmy are displayed as a message that only contains the title and the link to the message. This is a problem because Mastodon users will always see uninteresting posts and won’t want to interact. At the same time, Mastodon users, unless they use apps like Raccoon, will never have clear visibility into Lemmy communities, which are actual Activitypub groups. Only the Raccoon app is able to show Mastodon users and Activitypub group posts as topics, while any other Mastodon application would display them as disaggregated posts within the same continuous stream of all other posts.

These two issues make Lemmy integration with the Fediverse problematic. For example, I’m trying to push the communities of my Lemmy instance feddit.it among the users of my Mastodon instance poliversity.it, and today I can say with some satisfaction that half of the posts published on my Lemmy instance come from Mastodon users who have thus learned to integrate with the Lemmiverse.

Unfortunately, however, almost no other Mastodon instance administrator shows this interest. And unfortunately, mastodon remains the largest community in the Fediverse, the only one that could help Lemmy achieve a greater “network effect”!

This is a shame because mastodon users themselves could benefit positively from the existence of Lemmy communities as Activitypub groups.

So let’s hope something happens in the future.

It’s the Network effect. At the end of the day, Lemmy is still a lot smaller than Reddit, and of course that means there is less content, especially in more niche communities. The only way to really improve the situation is to grow the network with more users and more diversity.

I feel like the activity level is good enough to use it mostly, but I also still check in on Reddit regarly because some communities are simply very inactive on here.

I guess what you can do as an individual is to post more content, participate in the community, and help spread the word that the fediverse even exists.

Check multiple instances. .ml may be the flagship instance, but a lot of communities are more busy on topic specific instances. Nice thing about lemmy and federation is that you don’t need to hop sites to get their communities.

Programming.dev has most of the programming related comms. lemmy.dbzer0.com for piracy (and self-hosted AI). There’s a furry run instance, blahaj for LGBTQIA+ stuff, an anime focused instance, a literature focused one, a nsfw one, and lemmy.world for most else.

piracy comm is quite deserted?

Of you don’t use it then it will always be quiet.

That being said there is a slow change happening and personally right now I use Reddit, Mastodon, Blue sky and Lemmy.🙂

To my understanding, engaging helps engagement. So if I see a post and I can think of something useful to say, I make sure I do. Though slow at first, I have the impression it helps. Plus the more you interact, the more instances see the involved users, posts, groups and instances.

Also, Mbin (the software my instance uses) and Friendica both support the equivalent of X/Twitter’s retweets and Mastodon’s boosting for both posts and comments (even if the OP’s instance doesn’t support it). So in my case, if I see something I like, also for the sake of engagement growth as I also notice microblogging folk are more engaged, I make sure to tap the boost button too. Maybe it’d help if more people did it?

Personally I think of myself as holding space and keeping the current communities active while waiting for the software to mature. The devs have been making big strides with Lemmy 1.0, I think in a year or two we’ll begin to be a viable competitor to “normie” Reddit users similarly to how Linux achieved new levels of mainstream adoption in 2025.

Eh, mastodon is more like a twitter/instagram type thing, and thlse are both way bigger than reddit. So it’s natural that mastodon will have a lot more activity than lemmy.

But reddit is completely owned by the corporate elite, turns out u/maxwellhill was ghislaine maxwell, like it’s pretty bad how much reddit is in bed with evil powerful people.

So for that reason I’ve stopped using it.

I like it, I know exactly what kind of person seeks this out lol. You should hop on Rednote. Just give it a try. Not as an alternative, just a whole new thing

I feel like sometimes I click on an interesting post and the loudest voices are the most negative.