I have wildly more patience for Lemmy's glitches than I do for Reddit's. Lemmy's devs are working on a shoestring budget with just a few people trying to prop up a whole social network. The project is still pretty early in its life cycle.
As a developer, I am absolutely amazed that any of this (all the software you are using, all of it) even works a little. So: no.
I independently came up with "federation" (as in thought of it but not exactly this, and was building on others work) as the basis for a masters thesis in the early 2000s but left the program to get a job so never saw it through.
So, no, I am not annoyed. I am amazed, grateful, impressed, and humbled but I am not annoyed.
I've made the assessment that the growing pains are worth weathering, because Lemmy as a platform and wider community gives me much more joy than any big corpo platform I've ever tried.
I'm on Lemmy.world & using the eternity app I haven't had any real issues yet but it's only been about 2 months for me since I started using this platform.
I'm willing to put up with Lemmy's glitches. The vast majority of admins, mods, and developers are volunteers doing what they do (largely for free) simply because they think it's worth doing. If it were a product I paid for I would not be near as chill about it.
Lemmy was a fairly young project when everyone started piling in from Reddit. If the glitches you're experiencing bother you that badly, perhaps consider contributing to the project, the network or your homeserver. Open source projects work best when everyone contributes what they can, when they can and as they can.
Personally, every bug I've encountered has been because of my lemmy mobile client and not lemmy itself. This is remarkable to me, I work in QA and was expecting a lot more bugs when I joined
a little, but I’m dealing with it. 18 or so years ago, when reddit was new, it had a lot of bugs, was unstable, and would often go down for upgrades and maintenance.
although lemmy has been around for a few years, it hasn’t really been run or even tested as a serious platform until last summer when tens of thousands of new users flocked to it suddenly from reddit and both a bunch of new instances popped up and a bunch of new and rapid software releases brought a bunch of new features to handle the sudden growth. some growing pains are to be expected and, frankly, it’s all gone far more smoothly than I expected it would.
I'm self-hosting and it has been ridiculously smooth coupled with Voyager as my mobile app. Now I understand that a single user instance is a lot easier to handle than a multi-user one so I naturally don't have any experience or opinion on how Lemmy instances scale with users in terms of stability.
The app? There are many, many clients for Lemmy. Thunder is able to handle multiple versions and multiple accounts on multiple instances. This is a client API implementation limitation of whatever client you are using. Not Lemmy itself.
As for the federation issues, they are being worked out. Each major version has improved the internal server logic, improving the reliability of the inter-instance communication. But the changes have also come with kinks, that have had to be worked out with each sub-version update, before the team bites off on the next big improvement.
v19 introduced changes to how the federation queue works, and these are currently causing higher resource usage than before. Because of this, some instances seem to be falling behind on syncing federated content.
The only major annoyance I’ve encountered so far was the federation issues with 0.19. My instance recently upgraded and broke federation with instances like .world, so I’ve been shouting into a void with my comments on some instances.
I'm on programming.dev and using boost and have only had a couple issues.
Occasional downtime.
I had a weird one where I had someone else's subscriptions and it gave a wrong user error every time I commented.
As for the apps. Unless they specifically code it to detect and handle the version it's going to break. Changes to the required input or the output between versions are going to break apps.
That's kind of the price you pay for running as a collection of instances and not a single one.
Overall it's been great. But it do keep an account on lemmy.world incase my one goes down.
Sounds like your instance have federation issue, probably due to v0.19.0 updates. The latest version, v0.19.1, supposed to fix those federation issues. Not sure what's the server specs of your instance, but v0.19.x has increased database ram usage compared to previous versions, so if the instance is hosted on a tiny server, the admin may need to do some tinkering to make sure the federation process doesn't crash due to out-of-memory issue.
I took one passing look at how the thing is built, found out it's "basically all websockets for some reason", and stopped expecting it to work properly. Whenever it breaks I think "this is why you don't use websockets when you can just send a goddamn server side rendered web page or make an AJAX POST request" and I feel vindicated instead of annoyed.
I've not experienced any of the issues you mention. Why do you have to check other instances to see if your comments are visible. Trust that they will be eventually.
I've had fewer errors overall than I have Reddit, but your mileage is going to vary drastically based on your instance. I've briefly tried other instances, even fairly popular ones, and I'd describe the experience as nearly unusable.
I mean Lemmy World was at one point really unstable but this was due to an influx of Reddit refugees, malicious DDOS attacks and at one point malicious actors flooding the instance with CSAM - a reason why the Lemmy Shitpost community temporarily shut its doors.
I've not noticed glitching recently. Reddit's official app is the unstable crock of shit if anything.
I'm annoyed by my instance basically shutting down after I was told that it really didn't matter where I registered my Lemmy account back when I moved from Reddit.
Just because you’ve created a post or written a comment doesn’t mean other Lemmy users will see it.
I'm more annoyed that my instance presently reports a higher number of comments than what gets displayed (since moving to 19.0, I think). Sometimes, I can workaround that by changing the view, but often not. I wanna read what others have to contribute more than I care if they see what I say, but I was a lurker on the old site and I've never been on the mainstream socials.
One that's gotten me a few times is if you're typing a reply to someone, either in the comments or a PM, then mid-typing you upvote (or downvote) them (or anyone else), it deletes your comment-in-progress. I've lost a few comments that way, one of which took about 20 minutes to write which I just gave up on and didn't post afterward.
I also really don't like that the default language option is "Undetermined". It makes not labeling the correct language the default behavior, which makes a lot of foreign language material show up in my feed. Your own post and 2 of the 4 comments at the time of me posting are unlabeled.
Maybe you should ask your admin in !meta@lemy.nl or !chat@lemy.nl what's up with the specific errors on your instance. Maybe they had some problems operating it. You can always switch instances. My posts never disappear without reason. (They can also be removed if they violate the terms of an instance or community.)
The other issues also annoy me. Federation is somewhat broken and posts and comments often don't propagate to other instances since Lemmy version 0.19.0 (and 0.19.1 which should have fixed that.) It's the fault of the Lemmy developers to release a broken update. We'll see if they continue doing that or if they have learned something. I think they want to hire a third full-time developer. Maybe that helps.
The need to re-login and unable to login with an older client happened once. Things like that can happen if bigger changes are made. I don't think this will become a regular thing. And it's not that annoying in my eyes. Most importantly clients have to handle that correctly and give a meaningful error message and guide you to the login page. But some proper error handling is also missing here.
So: Yes. The things you mentioned also annoy me. Lemmy has still lots of room for improvement. And it's nowhere near other federated platforms. I hope the Lemmy devs aren't repeating the most annoying mistakes and fix federation soon so this can be an issue of the past...
At first, absolutely. Very frustrating, kept feeling the pull back you-know-where.
But then after a while, it became kind of a zen thing, if i'm using that word properly? It gives me time to breath a bit, rather than just doom scrolling at an increasing rate.
Maybe kind of part of the Lemmy Ritual? Maybe I'm strange.
On Lemmyworld and using boost for Lemmy, absolutely no bugs honestly. It's more stable than boost for reddit and that was head and shoulders above reddit's own cesspool of a mobile app.
The closest thing to a "bug" is poor optimization on posts with a bunch of hi res photos but that's it.