Honestly sheer numbers.

Multireddits.

Users.

Users

Videos. Viewing your up/downvotes. Profile posts.

Not a feature of Reddit, but I also miss RES features: user tagging, seeing my votes on a user next to their name, advanced post filtering, and more.

User and post flairs

Lengthy analytical comment debates in every trending thread. I'm not saying it's absent, of course, but there is a distinct lack of detailed high-level discourse.

To be fair, the same has plummeted on Reddit in recent years, but that's the major drawcard that Lemmy will take years itself to emulate.

Better moderation tools. A lot of these features are nice to have, but there is no way Lemmy can grow without better moderation tools.

Even with the tiny userbase, we're having problems with spam and rule breaking content. Add more users and it's going to be a mess.

Wiki pages for communities. It’s a great way to collect useful information that would otherwise get lost in different posts

Album posts. I'd like to share related pics in one post. Not sure how to do this if it's already there.

Small silly subs, like shaqholdingthings

More granular moderation tools.

But in the last dev AMA they made it clear that wasn't a priority. Honestly it killed a large chunk of excitement I had about Lemmy. Without ways for mods to keep the communities free of shit heads the communities won't be sustainable and will stop growing.

Finding "subLemmy's". I just browse the main page and block the sublemmys i dont like.

I might be alone in this, but everyone always talks shit about recommendations or "the algorithm" on a lot of platforms. It's really important though. There's a difference in usability if you see what you like really quick. If you want to make sure ppl don't get it if they don't need it, make it a new tab.

I really think Lemmy is great and it's potential is even greater, but users and ease of use are the bottleneck rn, and that goes for every aspect of it.

Videos hosting or someway to more seamlessly share video content. The Reddit player sucked fat donkey dicks, but the idea of viewing video in a post instead of clicking out to some rando site is much preferred.

Open in a new window/tab.

Since Lemmy is just a small federated alternative to Reddit, not that many people are gonna know about it. As a consequence, not that many communities that were on Reddit are as big on Lemmy, if they even exist at all.

It's actually better because now I can cut down on social media usage and spend my time on actually productive things, like watching paint dry.

More users would be nice, but ~~Rome~~ reddit wasn't built in a day either, so I'm hopeful that we'll get there eventually.

As for actual features, I'm missing the ability to upload videos directly to the site, but I can totally understand why it isn't a feature as it would eat up a lot more resources than just text and pictures.

None that matter. Lemmy doesn't have flair or awards or live chat or NFT avatars or any of that bullshit. And that's not a bad thing.

A way to easily find and join subs, from my phone/in the app, so I can have my own feed. I’m not willing to set my stuff up on my computer. I’ve worked in IT for over twenty years and I hate doing anything on my computer anymore and can’t get myself to even try. It’s a me problem but it didn’t exist with Reddit. From Apollo I could find, subscribe, leave subs and have my own custom feed. I’d still use Reddit instead if they didn’t kill third party apps. But they did, so I try to make this work but it’s sucks trying to see content so I just don’t spend much time here either, which is fine, I’ve taken to doing crosswords instead when I’m looking to pass some time.

Currently? Pictures.

Flairs and polls

A central place where everything happens. Or just the illusion of that.
Lemmy does not feel the same between instances/servers, and that makes everything seem smaller.
The only reason there was a small spike in lemmy users was because the competition entered phase 3 of their enshittening. Just like Mastadon lives off twitter going downhill. It’s not that the product is great, it’s just that it mimics a successful service and that service is going to shit.

Hasn't it been revealed that the devs are tankies who straight up refuse to implement features that they feel would undermine the cause?

For example, they have a hard coded Blocklist. There have been tickets to change this to instance implemented. Every time this comes up, the devs claim that this has already been implemented and lock discussion. However if you actually look at the commit sha the hard coded Blocklist is still in place.

I know some unofficial apps already have it but I like the idea of karma. Like nothing crazy with algorithms but just the summary of all the down/updoots on profiles