Fediverse, and Lemmy in particular, has "good bones" on it. But the software desperately needs to fix a bunch of bugs. They weren't quite ready for #RedditBlackout, but who would be?
I'm thinking more from the perspective of kbin vs Lemmy. I don't think anyone's noted kbin bugs. kbin.social grew to over 35k+ users this past weekend, so they're also having a substantial boost from #RedditBlackout.
Community has somewhat arbitrarily chosen Lemmy as the first project to check out. Nothing wrong with that. I think I'll try kbin.social soon and see if my experiences are better. Especially since kbin.social is federating with Beehaw.org, Lemmy.world and other instances.
--------
But I feel like the choice of front-end is important. Little differences, like @community (kbin) vs !community (Lemmy) will make things incompatible in the long run. So a community needs to choose whether to be on kbin-side or lemmy-side of the fediverse.
The fundamental issue I found with Lemmy was the refusal to accept the onboarding process as being off putting to reasonable people I would want to interact with in an online community.
I feel like Beehaw.org is quite pragmatic. By cutting off the #RedditBlackout users, they've kept their community feel and the focus on community building. I dunno if I want to be part of Beehaw.org, but I support their decisions and can see the long-term benefits of their way of thinking.
Lemmy.world obviously is trying to capture #RedditBlackout traffic, and that's fine too. This has its downsides, the bulk of which is that 90%ish of the discussion on Lemmy.world is all around Reddit and/or Lemmy, as opposed to more pragmatic issues.
--------
The happy medium I've found is to look for specific communities, no matter where they are. https://programming.dev/c/programming is small but looks like it has the right mindset. https://mtgzone.com/c/mtg also looks to have the right mindset, by creating a Magic-the-gathering focused group.
The issue in the near term is human-coordination. People don't know which !communities or servers host the discussions they want yet. That's fine, people will self-organize one way or the other.
EDIT: Of course, https://Lemmy.world can work. But most users are obviously here for lower-effort experimentation rather than community building. The https://lemmy.world/c/android community seems to be taking off though and is on the right track.
I see them being discussed. I don’t see them as “real issues” with lemmy though. They’re bugs to be fixed, not fundamental problems with the federation model.