this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024
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Fediverse

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I started up my own instance and now I have realized that there's no reason anyone would join mine instead of any other instance.

That's no good. What neat stuff would the Fediverse like to see in a Lemmy instance?

  • Follow RSS feeds in your Lemmy feed? I have that already, in a way, but it would be nice to be able to do it for any feed automatically without it being clunky.
  • Follow Mastodon users? Or tags?
  • Embedded video? That seems costly.
  • Hackability? The ability to run your own customized front end? Or good scripting features in the browser console?
  • A better looking UI? This one is functional but it's not pretty.
  • Better moderation? I have heard the Lemmy tools aren't that good.
  • Something else?
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[–] [email protected] 37 points 3 months ago (3 children)

AI post and comment assistant and an integrated crypto wallet. /s

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Can the pages play music, and animated avatars? I feel like you're onto something.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Bring back <blink> and <marquee> elements.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Can we also get a MIDI file to play at full volume whenever I open Lemmy?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

And if you could make the back button malfunction and then reload the page, and also open a dialog when I try to navigate away, that would be perfect.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Our profiles playing music and having their own effects that we can pick

With each day we're getting closer and closer to classic Myspace

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Cory Doctorow pointed out recently that having pages be ugly and half-broken is an immune system against creeping corporate influence. Marketing people are incapable of making ugly pages without collapsing into fits, so if every page on your system is ugly and homemade, they won't be able to fit in there, and they'll have a harder time turning it all into shit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The Internet really did feel more genuine back then when it was ugly and half broken.

It was less sterile and uniform

Every site was unique

Communities felt more real

There I go, whistfully looking to the past again

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Is this an early xkcd? The ending feels very "Cueball and Megan"...

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

I would split it the question into two areas, I think you're looking into the second part?

Why would I join a particular instance (of any fediverse platform)

  • High level rules/guidelines that align with what I want to see/avoid
  • A few active admins that can remove harmful content / bad users quickly. Experience with moderation and devops would be nice
  • If the instance "has a future" (backups, financials, long term plans)

Nice to have:

  • located in my country or somewhere with better privacy/financial laws. That way I have a way to influence things
  • plans to become (or run under) a not for profit

Why would I switch from Lemmy (software) to something else

Look at the discussion related to Sublinks where people talked about what they don't like about Lemmy. Some of the important points for me are moderation tools (ex. Automod), granular permissions for admins/mods, etc.

Would be nice

  • Being able to follow users would be nice, Mbin/Kbin has that I believe?
  • RSS feeds sure, but also being able to make custom feeds, similar to what "multireddits" were
  • customizability would be cool, you can look at what userscripts and browser extensions people made to improve their Lemmy experience

Depending on your area of experience, you could look into contributing to Sublinks development. It's being developed in a way that allows Lemmy instances to migrate smoothly, and they could be open to adding new features to the roadmap

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Nice comment.

Just going to mention [email protected] as another interesting alternative

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

I agree on the customizability.

The community aspects that form a reason to join this instance specifically are key, of course, but I have none of that. I just made this place. Now I need to make it neat enough that at least one person sees some reason to join, instead of one of 200 other already-popular instances.

I think making the frontend more customizable would be good for Lemmy as a whole, and also if I'm tinkering with it on this instance, maybe that can give a flavor to the instance and give a benefit to people who do decide to come by. It is more ambitious than I was thinking of, but I just looked for a while and it is not insurmountable.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Well, I'm not looking to leave .world, but custom flairs for communities and better moderation tools would be the two big ones that are missing right now.

... also, charts of views/posts per month in a community. I like seeing the squiggly lines

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What's lacking in the moderation tools? I've heard a lot of people talk about the lack. What are some things that are hard to do?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

For me, I think, to pass a report 'up the chain' to the admins, either to alert them of instance rules being broken (spam, questionable content, etc), or of a user abusing the report feature. 'Report' having more than "Yes I've seen it" as an option in notifications would be nice. A dedicated 'modmail' would be welcome too, as right now you play moderator roulette trying to figure out who to talk to when there's more than one moderator. Oh, and a common chat room thing for mods.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think hackability can go a long way towards this.

Especially on the frontend, there's no reason Lemmy shouldn't have custom "plugins" to change its behavior in certain ways. I think the issue isn't that the Lemmy developers don't want these things to exist that you're talking about, so much as them being the only ones in a position to make the changes or accept the PRs to make them happen. Of course in that situation, change will be slow and progress limited.

Me making changes to the frontend that intensive, or anything like it, was a bigger scope of change than I was expecting. I just wanted to make some tinkering things for my instance. But it wouldn't be impossible. And you could have your charts. Even little blinking lights and things.

Let me mull it over for a while.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think the issue isn’t that the Lemmy developers don’t want these things to exist that you’re talking about, so much as them being the only ones in a position to make the changes or accept the PRs to make them happen.

Lemmy maintainer here, and I'm really curious what gave you this idea. We generally welcome all contributions to the project. On the backend I made a pull request to add plugin support which is waiting for feedback. Onthe frontend I havent heard any interest in a plugin system yet.

So if this is something you want, you're welcome to implement it and open a pull request.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I completely agree. Maybe my phrasing was careless. I wasn't trying to be critical of the pace of accepting PRs or anything. I only meant that I think more flexibility in the frontend would help, instead of needing any minor UI change to go all the way through a cycle all the way up to you, incorporating it into the core codebase, and then filtering back down to an upgrade by the instance admin. But please don't take it as blaming you for any of that situation. I was raising it in the effort to propose a solution and also to advocate against people just complaining about the moderation tools and then moving on, and waiting for you to make them happy.

I did look at the backend plugin system PR, although sadly not enough yet to have any opinion or feedback on it. I do think a frontend plugin system, of sorts, could help a lot. I'm not sure when I will have time but I will try to put together something on this instance to show what I'm talking about, and if I do wind up doing it and it's well received, I am completely open to putting it together as a fixed-up and official PR for the main codebase.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

Better mod tools. From a moderator (not admin) PoV:

  • modmail
  • ability to tag users and annotate things about them, preferably in a way that is visible for the rest of the mod team
  • ~~a list of the most recent comments+posts in the community~~ EDIT - already there, as pointed out by ericjmorey. I feel dumb for not noticing it before.
  • some sort of automatic warning, based on keywords

Specifically for the desktop browser interface (IDK how much it applies to other interfaces), it would be great if the [M] for moderator was a tiny bit less evident when you're just posting/commenting as a user, but there was a stronger highlight when speaking officially. Plenty times I feel the need to start the comment with [speaking as a mod], as that shield icon is easy to miss.

For admins I can't speak personally, but the list Beehaw admins provided seems IMO sensible.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (4 children)

a list of the most recent comments+posts in the community

Are the the moderator views not what you're asking for here?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I spent a long time looking at it.

I think what it boils down to is hackability. The friction comes from people being unable to modify their experience, or the experience of their users, without going through this crazy process that involves it going all the way up to two Lemmy devs for the entire universe of users, and then something getting changed, and then it going all the way back down to the moderator or whoever, after the site admin upgrades the entire site. Or, going rogue and starting to change the code for their instance, which of course only the admin can do and voids the warranty.

I wasn't trying to become a Lemmy dev. I just wanted to make my instance neat, and I like to tinker. But I'm glad that people took the question seriously enough to give real, detailed answers about what would make things better. Lemmy is already designed to separate the backend and frontend very cleanly. I think it wouldn't be too hard (famous last words...) to make the frontend more hackable to make at least some of these into easier things to do at an end-user or end-administrator level.

It might be good to look at other software, too. I was thinking Lemmy, but the goal is the neat stuff, not the Lemmy part of it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

the Lemmy devs are currently working on a plugin system https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4695

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

People who are interested in and have knowledge on topics other than tech

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

It’s mainly about no Nazis.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I want an instance already established, very populated, and proven to last long term, so I don't have to create another account

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I will not have this to offer to you, I think.

I think it's unrealistic for people to switch instances unless something has gone badly wrong with their existing one. New users are still a thing, though, and besides, if I know my instance is better than all the others, then I'll still feel happy about it.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Have photon (phtn.app) as the default ui

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I want access to everything, fed users, customization, RSS integration, more and better tools. Hashtags that connect with mastodon like kbin would be cool.

Problem is I use mobile apps for lemmy so I'd probably not be able use any cool features. I tried for months on kbin's mobile site with and without scripts and it was still painful on my phone.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Honestly, I only want to see the posts I've upvoted but this is more of a feature request. 😅

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Hookers and copious amounts of cocaine.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Sad to say that we're all out of hookers. I hope this copious amount of cocaine is enough. :(

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

/c/backpage

No no, that is a bad idea.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

chat room to the side that anyone can use without logging in, but please add a CAPTCHA to it

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (4 children)

chat room to the side

Perfect.

that anyone can use without logging in

Absolutely not.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

The ability to ignore votes from other instances using an allow list. The ability to ignore votes in communities from unsubscribed accounts.

I see that your not talking about a Lemmy instance but a ui of a Lemmy instance. I think the biggest improvement from a UI perspective is button placement and confirmation messages for actions.

For instance, separate the delete post button from the edit post button and have a confirmation message for deleting a post so mistaken button presses aren't permanently unrecoverable.

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