Ask Lemmy

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

It's complicated. I've been here about a year and I'm still not sure how to use it properly.

Two different instance admins banned me from couple of community without telling me for which post or comment of mine were they banning me for, haven't responded when I asked them why, and because of that I can't see images posted by users from those instances.

Edit: This is what I see

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.

Not just Lemmy, but all Fediverse frontends: it's confusing and cumbersome. I've been here for 2 years and I still find that it's very much lacking in the "user experience" department. I have add-ons and scripts to 'patch' things that ought not to need patching. I don't know if it's possible for this to happen given the nature of Fedi, but it should be the case that a new user would find it works more or less the same as non-Fedi software and not have to juggle instances and type hideous and long URLs into the search bar. Instance names and stuff like that should be available to people who want to see them, but by default there's little reason to frighten new users with it. Make it be under-the-hood type stuff. One follow button that works for your home instance regardless of where you are on the Fediverse would be a nice start.

Also, privacy needs to be handled better. Again, not sure if that's possible because of the nature of Fedi, but Lemmy should make users feel more secure than reddit or Twitter, not less. Like, it's bizarre that reddit protects my privacy more than Lemmy does, given that reddit doesn't really protect my privacy much at all.