I’d like to see more instances with 100-500 users.
I know that’s a community thing, more than a Lemmy thing. I just don’t feel like I have a wealth of choices. I’m still on lemmy.world and when I look around, I don’t see a lot of medium-sized instances to migrate to.
Try to join an instance that is related to your geographical location or your country or state. That should result in a more even spread than what we have right now.
It’s a lot of work to admin an instance, though. I can understand if random people don’t want to do it. I hope one day someone does, because a California or Socal instance was the first one I looked for, too.
Accountability and transparency in moderation. You aren’t even made aware when you’re banned from a place, you have to go out of your way to see and even then you have zero recourse in changing the decision if it was made in error. It’s even worse when you get banned from your instance because it’s just suddenly you can’t log in and you don’t even know why. You can’t even transfer to a new instance. Pretty shit for something that can be done on the whim of a single person.
Somewhat related, as Lemmy continues to balkanize between pro-fascist instances (such as lemmy world, sh.ithole, and beehaw) and those explicitly against it (lemmy ml, lemmygrad, hexbear) the only way for users to opt out of interacting with users from those instances is to get yourself banned from the instance itself. I don’t mince words and have a zero-tolerance policy for injustice so it’s not hard for a person like me to catch those bans, but that’s hardly ideal for the federation as a whole to have to rely on something they can’t control in order to have a tolerable experience not constantly marred by some of the shittiest harassing assholes the federation has to offer.
EDIT: Maybe outright comment blocking on instances is a bit much, but absolutely auto-hide should be a thing.
Oh wait, you’re the nutball who starts calling people rapists and nazi pedophiles when you don’t like them, aren’t you? I saw you throw a spectacular hissy fit on some meme post.
Sometimes when I’ve found new communities on non local instances I’m unable to subscribe directly and I get a screen where it asks me what instance I’m subscribing from and when I click the only suggestion “lemmy.world” it doesn’t recognize it as valid. I know you can subscribe to these communities in distant instances by using the local search bar with an exclamation point in front of it but it’s a convoluted process and could be streamlined.
Another thing I just ran into, if I’m linked to the on-instance version of a thread on an instance other than my home, it says I need to log in or register to comment. How do I switch to the version of that same post as seen from my home instance? I wouldn’t need to register a separate account because I see a lot of off-instance posts on my home feed. Perplexing.
I just use another app that doesn’t hide read posts - it’s a shitty workaround and really only functions for my local communities with little turnover, though
I wonder if down votes should be lightly nerfed. The idea would be to make it easier for people to post mildly unpopular opinions in hopes of furthering discussions and weakening brigading. I imagine there are a lot of people who comment once, get downvoted and then either never comment again, or only comment in ways that are safe and appeal to the community’s biases and sense of humor.
Something like requiring 10 downvotes to drop from 1 to 0.
Oh, it would also discourage spite downvoting since it would be hard for any one user to push a persons comment to 0.
Or since scores aren’t really even tracked across all of your posts and comments, we could just care a little less about how people are voting on our posts. If one isn’t well received it’s really not the end of the world.
@scrubbles That's really cool! Definitely something for people to consider rather than developing hyper-specific moderation tools for their own Lemmy or whatever.
I guess the ‘simple’ way of doing this would be adding tags to communities like ‘art’ ‘hobbies’ ‘sport’ ‘football’ etc. This might then let the app suggest others based on the tags you are subscribed to.
It would probably still require some AI/analytics to work out the links based on user activity in different communities/tags but I think it would make it easier to group interests and promote smaller communities.
It could also improve Lemmy visibility in Masterdon if the tags are used as hashtags or something. (Would require more work)
Kbin lists "related magazines" which are similar communities in the fediverse. Not sure how it works but I think it may be based on hashtags like this.
Problem here is also that your instance may not know about all communities from the instances you’re connected to. This could probably also be improved.
Yes, that’s what I mean by not trivial, a centralized system can do analysis like this a lot easier. But even on your own instance, they could find the N users with the most overlapping subscriptions and check which communities they follow to give you recommendations.
Recommendation algorithms are a big reason for the enshitification of other social media. You don’t need to be connected to everything everywhere all at once. Enjoy your handful of small communities.
I don’t want random posts to appear in my feed from communities I haven’t subscribed to, but I want to have a feature that shows me suggestions for communities when I ask for it. That’s a big difference. Right now it’s (too) hard to find these communities.
Hashtags could possibly help with this. When making a post, a user can add hashtags which categorize the content. One can then search hashtags, or subscribe to them to find new communities. Probably not as passive as you’d be looking for, though.