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Fediverse @lemmy.world
PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat
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What do you want to have in a Lemmy instance?

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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94 comments

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

    37

  • 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

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    • Nice comment.

      Just going to mention !piefed_meta@piefed.social as another interesting alternative

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      • There's some... questionable design choices with PieFed that I'm not sure I agree with. For instance marking people with lots of downvotes as "low reputation" and not counting reputation in kinda arbitrary "low-effort" communities (apparently that means mostly memes). And then there's the way things are split into topics, which seems to be decided by the admin rather than decided by the communities themselves (afaik).

        All the power to the dev but it's a bit too... opinionated (not sure that's the right word) for me.

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    • 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.

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  • 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

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  • 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.

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    • 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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      • The mod view only shows you the posts, not the comments. To see the newer comments you still need to open each post individually.

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    • 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.

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    • modmail

      Just out of curiosity, what does this mean in detail? Would every mod get their own report that they'd need to dismiss? Or how should it work?

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      • Modmail is like direct messages, but with a message box shared by all moderators of the same community. Any mod of that comm can see the messages sent to that box, or use it to send messages to the users.

        This has a few benefits:

        • Typically, users don't know which mod they should contact for clarifications, ongoing issues, etc. Because they don't know who's active, or even who can solve that issue.
        • Sometimes a mod needs to issue a warning, but that would be insensitive or impolite to do through comments; for example if it involves the privacy of a third person. Doing so through DMs sounds like the specific mod picking on the user, instead of issuing an official warning.
        • It reduces the likelihood of miscommunication between users and mods. For example: user contacts mod A, mod A allows the user to post something, user posts it, mod B sees the post, and remove it. With a shared message box, mod B would see that mod A allowed the user to post it, and leave the post alone.

        It isn't currently a big pressing matter, as current mod teams are kind of small. However I think that it's necessary for Lemmy's growth.

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  • Fair moderation. The biggest problem with the largest instances is that they are heavily skewed towards communist ideals and censorship, and mods will ban you for holding (locally) controversal opinions despite not breaking any rules. And sometimes the rules are too arbitrary and get used as a scapegoat to ban you for your opinion.

    Programming.dev has been a very good example of how moderation should be done, but it is for programmers, thus may not be appealing to the typical user, and they end up on lemmy.ml instead and get banned because the mod was in a bad mood and didn't like your opinion.

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  • It’s mainly about no Nazis.

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

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    • I want to have artistic and photographic content and make the interface less GTK-like, especially on mobile, to try to make it acceptable to the normal people. I am techie so I think it will always have a significant tech vibe, but yes. If it had about 80% fewer people talking about Linux and US politics, I think that would represent a big improvement in the experience.

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      • TL;DR: Only use Subscribed, or block all the politics and Linux communities, although you'll probably never completely escape US politics. Also, non-tech is there, just not getting much engagement.

        I only look at Subscribed to avoid all the depressing posts. Linux I can scroll by, politics is often emotionally-charged and upsetting. And even if you block all the politics there are non-political communities still posting articles about how X awful thing is happening. Useful? Probably. On topic? Yes. It is fine to want, get, and post links to news articles on a link aggregator site. But personally it makes me doomspiral about how many things are wrong with the world and I come here to have fun. I stay informed elsewhere. I think taking a similar approach could help people annoyed by all the US politics and Linux.

        Then again, I'm aware people probably have a higher tolerance for miseryposting than I do (I am overly sensitive/prone to doomscrolling so I really need to not see it—have not doomscrolled and wasted time to it ever since I started heavily curating my online life like this and I feel a lot better) and so they put up with it to see new stuff on Local or All, in exchange for seeing too much of the stuff they don't like or have any interest in (in this case, US politics and Linux). I do not particularly care too much about seeing new stuff, which makes the tradeoff of staying insulated against things I don't want to see versus not being exposed to anything new worth it for me. People who do care about seeing new stuff might be better off with the blocking approach, which could probably remove most Linux and US politics with a relatively small count of blocks. Although you'll still probably encounter some: I know will still leave a ton of "life sucks" memes with the comment full of "I agree, I wish healthcare wasn't so bad" or something else that's just a reminder of US politics. Or Bad Thing Happened news that people in the comments attribute partially to a US political decision. Back when I used Reddit I went to r/therestofthefuckingowl for tutorials that were funny because of how they skip important instructions, leaving a beautiful final product and no idea how to get there. Thought it would be nice and fun. There's a moneymaking tutorial there that I personally feel was posted as political commentary, with all the comments full of 1. be rich 2. don't not be rich and anger against out-of-touch rich people and you guessed it, US politics-specific complaints about things they think are making life hard for not-rich people. But because the tutorial really did fit the skipping important instructions format the comments full of political yelling and real life angsting got to stayed up on a sub that was supposed to be fun, not yet another "world sucks, fuck the rich elites" misery/anger central. (Yes, I agree with a lot of these politics people post even! I just am usually not looking for this online and do not want it to pervade every space.) You can probably never escape it completely.

        The trouble with a lot of non-tech communities is that they exist, but are often small and don't get much engagement. I'm lucky enough to be in some that do, but even so I'm one of the primary posters… can't do much about the demographics and interests here, all you can reasonably expect is for them to not be mean to people who differ.

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  • Have photon (phtn.app) as the default ui

    5

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

    5

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

    4

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

    4

  • 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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  • Hookers and copious amounts of cocaine.

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  • The RSS feeds thing feels like a good one.

    Additionally, some feature where you can start a community but define it simply as a combination of RSS feeds … essentially a feed aggregator. But one that others can share and subscribe to.

    I think a bot could handle most of that.

    Hackable front end is interesting. You can already run multiple alternative front ends. Lemmy world offer 5 I think. Then, they just need to be scriptable if that’s what you want.

    Restyling the default one seems to be common though

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    • The pondercat rss bot can already do that. You can create a community that gets posts from any number of RSS feeds.

      Well, you can't, but I can. I don't want to make it available for anyone to use yet, because I don't want an explosion of RSS spam, but if you want to connect some RSS feeds to a community and it's not going to become obnoxious, I can do that for you.

      Hackable front ends, I think, could be a huge deal. I don't know how easy that is, but if it's possible for someone to run a modified version of the frontend just for them out of a subdomain, without it being a security nightmare, that would solve a lot of these issues of wanting an extra button on the report page, but having to have it go from you to the site admin to Nutomic back to a code update to a PR and back down the chain and so on, before it can get done.

      With some web apps, that's easy, and Lemmy's frontend and backend are already nicely separated. I don't know if there have to be privileged things running in the frontend, though. I looked at it just now but I couldn't completely sort out how realistic it is. That might mean it's not very realistic.

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  • Management that has multiple conflicting ideology and walks of life but respect each other and has a professionalism and tolerance for people they disagree with and invite them to discuss instead of ruling with a iron fist like feudal fief lords.

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  • 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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    • You can undelete posts

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      • When did that get added? That's great!

        Thanks for pointing that out.

        But the buttons being too close is still annoying. That's only one example of buttons being too close too. A moderator can ban someone from a community and accidentally appoint that someone as a moderator. And confirmation messages for uncommon actions is just good UX too.

        I think there's also a weird and inconsistent mix of buttons shown by default and hidden under a dropdown menu. There are many added clicks to do a lot of things for no gain.

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  • Having some sort of democratic non profit behind it like codeberg which seem to be doing really well (or like a cooperative bank), anyone can be a member as long as he pays fees that help projects for the instance (which could include paying bounties or freelancers for lemmy feature development). You would have a election where you vote for a board of directors or even just one "instance leader" or something like that and he or they decide what to fund or what mods to appoint or impeach. You could copy codeberg bylaws and it might actually work.

    You could argue just letting basically average people elect management would lead to incompetent management (plato made the same arguments, your in good company), but this model has it advantages and seems to work well . The American Association for the Advancement of Science uses this model and created one of the most well regarded science journal in the world (science)

    2
    • Proof of Humanity. There is some work about using Zero Knowledge Proofs as a way to be able to indicate that the owner of a key can also prove ownership of another set of credentials without having to reveal these credentials to third parties. This would allow us to really get rid of bots and sockpuppets.
    • The ability for users to bring their own cryptographic keys and actor id. This way even if a server goes down people could port their whole account over to a different server.
    • Multi-protocol federation.
    • Get rid of downvotes/upvotes and replace it with multi-dimensional scoring/ranking system.
    • User-defined sorting/ranking. I do not want to completely block people, but I do wish to have a system that could boost/de-emphasize posts by certain people on certain topics, and completely ignore them in others.
    • Cooperative media storage and distribution that could leverage the storage from clients as well as servers, something based on bittorrent.
    • Custom widgets that can be attached to a post/community. For example, I'd like to have a play-by-play tracker for basketball/football games.
    • RDF/Semantic Web descriptors. If people are talking about a TV show, or making a list of PC components that they want to review or anything that can be part of a knowledge graph should be linkable and browsable by a specialized browser.
    • Collaborative lists/articles/posts. With the item above, it would be trivial to create wikipedia-style posts where a community can build their "common knowledge" and would make it easier for newcomers to get general recommendations and/or a sense of the community values.
    2

    • This is by far my favorite set of suggestions. This is the kind of hackability fun instance that I would love to be a part of.

      Proof of Humanity. There is some work about using Zero Knowledge Proofs as a way to be able to indicate that the owner of a key can also prove ownership of another set of credentials without having to reveal these credentials to third parties. This would allow us to really get rid of bots and sockpuppets.

      Can you explain more? How would this do anything to prevent sockpuppets? I don't think they are preventable. I think the closest thing that exists is Something Awful's forums, where you have to pay $10 to participate and your user can be banned at the drop of a hat if you get out of line, and you're out $10. So you can run as many sockpuppet accounts as you want, as long as you feel like investing in what it'll take to keep making new ones.

      That approach works perfectly on SA and I think there's something to it, but the $10 would be so shocking to the Fediverse mindset that I think it would be impossible for anyone to be on board with it.

      The ability for users to bring their own cryptographic keys and actor id. This way even if a server goes down people could port their whole account over to a different server.

      You can't bring an actor ID to a new domain name, can you? I can imagine an outlandish solution with each user registering their own domain for their actor, or having one provided by a guaranteed-trustable service, and then the server supporting those "foreign" actors, but it's definitely not easy. The idea of porting your stuff to a new server is an excellent idea but I think it's difficult to do with ActivityPub.

      Multi-protocol federation.

      Absolutely.

      Pixelfed has support for most of the Fediverse: Lemmy's communities, Mastodon's groups, and Mastodon's microblogging. I'm thinking about messing around with Pixelfed before going any further with the Lemmy plan. Pixelfed might or might not work, but it might be a pure superset of what Lemmy can do, after some minor UI changes.

      Get rid of downvotes/upvotes and replace it with multi-dimensional scoring/ranking system.

      User-defined sorting/ranking. I do not want to completely block people, but I do wish to have a system that could boost/de-emphasize posts by certain people on certain topics, and completely ignore them in others.

      This is one of the biggest things, to me. I messed around with some code to analyze the network of votes and make global determinations about users, and it worked well. Having the scoring and selection of posts being something that just has some quick math thrown at it but mostly left alone is a big missed opportunity to me.

      Having a powerful hackable framework to customize the feed you're seeing, or add multiple feeds you can switch between, would be fantastic.

      Cooperative media storage and distribution that could leverage the storage from clients as well as servers, something based on bittorrent.

      I messed around with this too. It's not simple and I didn't get very far, but this is a very good idea to me. It also helps with hackability, because once you have that backing store that's using some model other than HTTP requests to nginx on the central instance, it's easy to make it writable for client-side plugins. It's a very, very ambitious thing but I like it very, very much.

      Custom widgets that can be attached to a post/community. For example, I’d like to have a play-by-play tracker for basketball/football games.

      Yes, exactly. I think once of the very next things on my list are seeing how realistically this kind of widget can be added to the Lemmy UI in a way that's customizable by the user. I think it's pretty easy. But all of this is work and work is hard, of course.

      RDF/Semantic Web descriptors. If people are talking about a TV show, or making a list of PC components that they want to review or anything that can be part of a knowledge graph should be linkable and browsable by a specialized browser.

      Collaborative lists/articles/posts. With the item above, it would be trivial to create wikipedia-style posts where a community can build their “common knowledge” and would make it easier for newcomers to get general recommendations and/or a sense of the community values.

      This, I didn't think very much about. If there's a hackable framework for client-side tools, though, someone who wants to do these things should find it pretty easy.

      This is exactly the type of thing I want to do.

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      • Can you explain more? How would this do anything to prevent sockpuppets?

        Imagine something like a verification check (like Twitter's old blue check) that is exclusively associated with your national ID. You can have only one of those. If you want to create sockpuppets, you'd have to convince someone else to (a) give them access to their ID and (b) be willing to lose their ability to prove their own identity elsewhere.

        It's not absolutely safe against bots and sockpuppets, but it surely makes it more expensive than even a $10/account membership.

        Pixelfed has support for most of the Fediverse.

        PIxelfed is still just supporting ActivityPub. I'm talking about multi-protocol communication. A smart client should be able to let you communicate with Lemmy communities, subreddits, Facebook groups and all types of different platforms from a single unified interface. There are plenty of people that think this is something undesirable (like everyone that wants instances to block Threads), but I'd argue that building these integrations with closed platforms would eventually destroy them because they would lose the monopoly on network effects.

        You can’t bring an actor ID to a new domain name, can you?

        No, but you could have a web server that responds to multiple domains. Ideally, the server listening and responding to the AP requests should be able to work with multiple "virtual servers", instead of having to have only one instance == one domain that we today. AFAIK, only Takahe does this for microblogging.

        1

    • Get rid of downvotes/upvotes

      This. I haven't found a way to disable up/downvotes, even just their visibility in the UI. I understand the value of users rating post and comments, however I think the visible metrics turn Reddit and Lemmy alike into competitions for karma points rather than discussion.

      0

      • Yes, but not just that. For example, the top comment on this thread is just a sarcastic jab at SV startups and not a real answer to the question. This makes it easy to setup a whole comment chain of (imo) completely useless comments and drowns out any chance of a more serious conversation in the context.

        This is not to say that I wish to get rid of all funny/casual commentary that might come off in a discussion, I just wish that I could have some form of context.

        Some comments could be marked as "forgettable" so that servers could just drop them after a while, others should be saved because they are important as a reference. This is what I mean by "multi-dimensional". I think that downvotes are important to curate "bad content", but it would be even better if people could also signal why/what that comment is bad.

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      • Reddthat.com disable downvotes, that's something

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  • Honestly at this point there's a fairly large number of instances so yours would need a selling point to even begin. And that's before taking things like owner behaviour and strictness into consideration because the instance theme and tools will always be the first impression.

    "Generic catch all instances" are common. You can only build up a user base if existing people are willing to ditch their own. What are yours doing that the current ones do not?

    • Do you have a focus on a particular topic? I would consider posting a beautiful photo that I took on an instance dedicated to photography rather than the catch all one.
    • Is your UI unique/pretty? Which leads me to the next point...
    • Do you offer certain tools available/unique to your instance? 1) If yes, why can't they be integrated with base lemmy? It's open source after all. 2) If no for whatever reason (Lemmy devs slow to respond, low on their priority, will not accept, I don't agree with their behaviour etc) is there a reason it cannot be included on other existing instances? Why is it exclusive to yours?

    And then I would start looking at the details like what would uptime be, how much are you yourself making an effort to contribute and expand, etc

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  • If there's a person (or bot) that claims to be unbiased but spams every political post with a biased assertion of the OP's partiality/impartiality with a huge post that is low effort copy+paste/script-generated, the correct response is to ban that person (or bot).

    This is nothing new to online communities, but this instance seems to be struggling with this.

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