Very good, I have been thinking of something quite similar. A “what if I could have everything I want” social media platform. Here are some of the most important aspects, maybe they are useful to you:
-Self-governing communities like Lemmy (not sure if instances make sense) with very fine-grained control over who can see and post what. You can either have a completely open community where everyone can see every post and everyone can post OR you can have an invite-only community where users can only see posts since they joined (and are allowed to see) and every post is anonymous OR anything in between.
-I like Lemmy for the ability of instances to block each other, but not sure how that makes sense in the context of a decentralized backend.
-Users should have the option to post anonymously or at least pseudonymously (on a community basis) in any community. They should have a choice if they want to share their post/comment history and with whom. Of course, communities have control over whether they allow that or not too. You might have one community that doesn’t allow anonymous posting at all, and another that only allows it if you have some form of reputation like karma. But I think optional pseudonymity on a community basis is a MUST. And if mods ban a pseudonymous account, the entire account is banned; they can’t just come back with more pseudonyms. I know people will get riled up over this, but I think it is important to let people speak their minds without fear of repercussions, also it’s important for privacy and to protect from doxxing.
-Also, optional automatic post pruning, where posts are deleted after X amount of time.
-Ideally, you should have the ability to have a community be like a Reddit sub, a 4chan-like board, or just you and your friends’ private server.
-Communities can be forked by anyone with the right permissions. They will become the new mods, and the fork with the most users gets to keep the name. For that reason, communities aren’t necessarily hosted on instances like Lemmy, but on some decentralized backend like IPFS. This is so you don’t have to copy all the content and user data, but just the references to it, to make forking as low-cost as possible. This is done to rein in the power of mods, making them work for the users. Also, it would allow communities to more easily naturally split without losing old content.
-I would have an “app market” for community-created feed algorithms, block lists, filtering algorithms, etc., where users can pick based on features, hosting cost, etc… AI filtering is well and good, but it’s still expensive, so you have to account for that. It would give users the ultimate power over their own user experience. I hate outsourcing social media algorithms to other people; it’s like outsourcing your own brain and letting others decide what you think.
-Reposts should be lumped together in yout feed. Ideally, you wouldn’t see the same post twice. This also applies to media; the same photo with a different title shouldn’t be shown twice. But perhaps you have some threshold where if the context is different enough, you show it twice.
-Like you said, AI post/comment filters. For example, I only want to be able to see left-wing comments or comments about cats or positive/negative comments. Comments could be clustered into categories like that, perhaps creatable by the users themselves. Also, I want the ability to see a broad mix of these categories. For example, for political subs, I want to know what each political orientation is thinking about this.
-Comment filters for the most unique comments. It should show me the one guy in a million samey comments who thinks there is a wizard conspiracy behind all world events, if I want to see that.
-Comment section summary, telling you what all the unique opinions in the comments section are. So if there are 10,000 comments about cats and one about a dog, I want to see 50% what the cat and 50% what the dog people think in the summary. Something like that.
-Built-in text post/link summary.
-A trending feature like Twitter, but more with smart keywords, not hashtags. So, for instance, 100 posts about the same soccer game with completely different content are shown in trending with the keyword “Frogfordshire Divided vs. Botingialera FC.” I believe that should be possible and financially viable with LLMs in the near future.
-Reverse image search should be built in, and possibly even image-to-text that will then show you similar text posts to what is in the image.
-Similarly, automatic AI captioning/summary of photo, video, audio content for better search and also for people with disabilities.
-A separate feed like TikTok that aggressively tailors to your revealed preferences, alongside the regular feed. Like how YouTube has a normal feed and one for shorts.
-You should have “recommendation algorithm save points.” I often click on one wrong YT video and my entire feed is off all of a sudden. So, I would like to be able to revert to the earlier point in the recommendation algorithm. Honestly, with modern ML embedding-based algorithms, that shouldn’t be that hard. You just allow users to save their personal vector/embedding. It’s literally just saving a history of vectors equivalent in size to tweets (Xweets? Xs? exes?).
-A built-in conversational AI would be nice, that you can ask about any comments on a post, what is in the post, what is in the image (like “Identify this mushroom for me”).
-Custom multicommunity feeds like multireddits, and also searches explicitly within this multicommunity. I often browse the Imaginary network for concept art, which just lumps together multiple subs.
I would say the forking, the visibiliy/posting permissions, pseudonymity, custom feed/filtering algorthism are the most important features. Everything else is just nice to haves.