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
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.
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.
I’ve ended a relationship because the girl drove like an impatient bafoon. If you have a superiority complex about a speed limit in residential areas, I’ll sit in the passenger seat railing about how you’re such a shit driver. Just drive the speed limit and gently.
Protect your back. Use proper form when lifting heavy weights. I let my back go round while pressing a few hundred pounds on an incline leg press in my 20s, bulged a disk, and ever since my mid 30s it has been my Achilles’ Heel. Goes out without warning. Completely lays me up when it does. Rubbish. Wish I could go back and undo that.
I came here to say that, and I’ll add wear ear protection if you’re anywhere loud. Who gives a shit if you don’t look cool wearing a headset or ear plugs. You know what else isn’t cool? That constant ringing in my ears because I was an idiot for years. I have to sleep with two loud fans now.
Omg yes the ear protection. I never paid attention to the warnings, it was just a loud club on a random Thursday after all. I was too young to realize the compounding effect. Even now I look back and feel like my partying and exposure to loud fun was mild, yet here I am with partial hearing loss and a portable white noise generator.
Man, I’m fortunate enough to not have any lasting/recurring pain (so far) but I was working harder than I should have and sprained some ribs. I didn’t even know that was possible.
That was the single worst 3 days I have ever experienced. It was like being water boarded with pain. It hurt to breathe. I couldn’t breathe deep at all and occasionally had spasms where all I could do was stand and focus on getting oxygen.
I couldn’t lie down either so I couldn’t sleep. What little sleep I got was sitting up on the couch with my arm propping up my head on the arm rest.
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
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.
It is not, partly because it is still rough and just written, and partly because I’m scared people will start blasting RSS spam everywhere and it will be my fault.
partly because I’m scared people will start blasting RSS spam everywhere and it will be my fault.
That is fair. Might be worthwhile talking to instance admins and core devs about how best to make use of it? Putting it behind some admin approval or administration might be the best way.
There was an instance a while back that was dedicated to something similar. Their system was to define the feeds themselves without any real user input, and it never really took off.
Maybe a dedicated instance that provides more user control but is also set up to control and limit things could go a long way? One basic control might be limiting usage to user accounts older than a certain threshold. lemm dot ee does this for image uploads (4 weeks minimum age).
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.
I saw that already. Programming.dev was right away on point about hiding some of my RSS bot’s posts, unless the users were subscribed, because it was spamming their users’ feeds and they didn’t want that. They’re clearly invested in their users having a good experience instead of, I guess, wanting to order them around? I’m not familiar but it looks like programming.dev is doing it right.
I agree. The moderation on Lemmy is halfway to Reddit’s. There are random rules for no reason. I don’t fully get it.
As far as I know, lemmy.ml and hexbear are the only heavily communist and censorship prone servers out of the top twelve. They were here first, but we really need to stop perpetuating the notion that they represent or dominate Lemmy as a whole, along with the idea that they represent a typical moderation experience on this platform.
I feel like the numerous well-moderated instances don’t get enough credit. The actions of lemmy.ml moderators tend to shape the narrative about Lemmy moderation, which is unfair to other servers and repels new users from the platform. Other instances aren’t perfect with moderation either, but at least they generally try to moderate in good faith and with some degree of neutrality, which is the most you can really ask for.
The primary influence that remains is lemmy.ml still hosts a disproportionate number of major communities, but that’s slowly changing.
Fair point. I said the biggest, but as you said, lemmy has been outgrowing the original instances. lemmy.ml hosting so many major communities is still a problem, but if that is slowly changing, I see a good future in Lemmy. OP seems decent so let’s hope it grows into a fine instance.
kbin.life
Hot