I mean... it is. A few weeks ago the user base was very small and there was very little activity on Github (bug reports, feature requests, additional developers). Now there is a flourishing community and a lot of pull requests from new developers, leading to many smaller and bigger improvements.
The timing could've been better as the Lemmy devs were in the middle of a bigger refactoring (getting rid of websockets), which hindered development and the release of new versions. But I for once are happy with how active the development is.
Any platform will experience growing pains when their userbase increases dramatically. Even Reddit was frequently crashing when it acquired Digg's users, and still does from time to time.
I for one I'm very glad federated platforms are starting to pick up steam, and willing to weather the glitches. It feels like a return to the old Internet, where users had the control instead of a handful of megacorporations and investors/stockholders.
The reality in 2023 is all software is unbaked software. All software is buggy, frustrating, and almost-broken to the point of almost-unusable. There is simply nothing else, and we all navigate through this dystopic universe by finding software that are tolerably frustrating for each of us. The threshold is different for everyone. Reddit is buggy as hell and experiences downtime most weeks. I'm sure Lemmy has bugs too, but it's all about whether the trade-off makes sense for a critical mass of people. We will see.
I think the important thing is the trajectory. Is it getting better over time, or worse? It seems like a lot of software eventually hits a peak and starts a long, slow decline -- especially internet services and social media platforms.
I read that bug was fixed recently, at least on lemmy.world. They accidentally left federation debugging on, so federating the post was happening in the foreground instead of the background, so your post probably succeeded and you were waiting for federation of the message to complete.
I am too, but I am sticking with it for now. It is really hard to ignore all the horrible horrible bugs, though.
> I’ve tried to reply to a post this morning and the submit button just spins. No error, nothing.
I have the same issue. I always always copy the text I've written before submitting on Lemmy, because it happens so often that it just swallows the text and my comment is gone forever.
I have noticed that manually setting the language to "English" (below the text box) somehow reduces the failure rate significantly. No idea why.
Other things I have issues with:
- The "Hot" ordering on my instance is never updated. The newest "Hot" post is 4 days old by now and it never changes anymore. Not sure what happened 4 days ago, but I can only browse by "New" or "Active". The "Active" browsing is dumb, because I think every new comment is bumping it up again, and "New" only gets you the brand new stuff that nobody has commented on yet. "Hot" would really be my preference, but that's broken...
- The commenting issues described above. If I don't set the language, I sometimes see "language_not_allowed", and sometimes the text just vanishes. The Android app isn't working anymore because of this. It won't let me set the language and it won't let me post or comment.
- Subscribing to other communities is painful. The UX is not there yet. You can't just subscribe. Instead you have to manually copy the URL to the search box and let your instance discover the community, and then you can subscribe.
- Missing comments/posts: When subscribing to a new community, you won't ever receive old comments for posts. You'll see new comments come in, but there is no sync mechanism (not even a manual one) to retrieve the old stuff. This leaves you with an incomplete view of the world.
- Missing comments/posts (part two): Even if you have subscribed for a long time, comments and post will not have all comments always, either because of a delay of minutes (or hours!), or just because of bugs, idk. It's annoying.
- Security: There are some bad security issues [example: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3060], which is obvious in the early stages of a piece of complicated software like this. But still. I think the reckoning will come eventually now that Lemmy is on the radar.
- Privacy: There are a number of privacy concerns, namely that posts can never truly be deleted, and that things are public that should not be (like likes/dislikes). See https://discuss.ntfy.sh/comment/51609
This is a bad bug, but there are plenty other small things. Like why is “Join Lemmy” link still displayed when I’m logged in?
Feels like unbaked software to me. That’s on top of all the multiple federated instances you need to wrap your head around.
I’m not sure this can compete :(