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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?
PugJesus ,

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

PhilipTheBucket OP ,

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?

PugJesus , (edited )

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.

PhilipTheBucket OP ,

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.

nutomic ,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

PhilipTheBucket OP ,

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.

nutomic ,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Yes that sounds like a good idea. Unfortunately lemmy-ui isn’t getting many contributions so development is rather slow, but contributions are always welcome. I don’t work on that project myself, so I suggest you discuss it in the dev chat on matrix to make sure your approach will actually work.

SatansMaggotyCumFart ,

Hookers and copious amounts of cocaine.

PhilipTheBucket OP ,

/c/backpage

No no, that is a bad idea.

Lemminary ,

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

SatansMaggotyCumFart ,

What about women that don’t know they’re hookers yet?

BuddyTheBeefalo ,

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

PhilipTheBucket OP ,

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

Gormadt ,
@Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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

PhilipTheBucket OP ,

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.

Gormadt ,
@Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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

PhilipTheBucket OP ,

https://ponder.cat/pictrs/image/14ea242a-6d4d-4b40-a99c-0279440922b8.jpeg

threelonmusketeers ,

Is this an early xkcd? The ending feels very “Cueball and Megan”…

PhilipTheBucket OP ,

That is exactly what it is, yes.

threelonmusketeers ,

Thanks! Found it.

shnizmuffin ,
@shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lol avatar

Bring back <blink> and <marquee> elements.

jballs ,
@jballs@sh.itjust.works avatar

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

PhilipTheBucket OP ,

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.

EleventhHour ,
@EleventhHour@lemmy.world avatar

I have an app where I can just type “+gpt <gpt prompt>” into any text field, so I have that already.

Seems slightly unfair to put that workload on the server.

The app is “MacGPT” and runs in the menu bar. I presume that such a useful utility almost certainly would exist for Linux, maybe on windows.

ericjmorey ,
@ericjmorey@discuss.online avatar

Thanks, I hate it.

jared ,
@jared@mander.xyz avatar

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.

PhilipTheBucket OP ,

Mobile apps will always lag behind. You’re right, though. The Lemmy mobile interface is a terrible miniaturized version of the already not-great desktop interface.

parpol ,

deleted_by_author

    •
    PhilipTheBucket OP ,

    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.

    imaqtpie , (edited )
    @imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works avatar

    You make a valid point but I just want to push back a bit. These are the largest Lemmy instances in order of monthly users

    large instances- lemmy.world - 17.7k - lemm.ee - 3.2k - sh.itjust.works - 2.5k - lemmy.ml - 2.5k - hexbear - 1.8k - lemmy.ca - 1.3k - feddit.de - 1.2k - programming.dev - 1.1k - lemmy.dbzer0.com - 1.1k - lemmy.blahaj.zone - 900 - feddit.org - 900 - discuss.tchncs.de - 866

    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.

    threelonmusketeers ,

    feddit.de - 1.2k

    Isn’t feddit.de is gone now, or at least broken to the point of rarely being usable?

    I think most users have moved to feddit.org now.

    imaqtpie ,
    @imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works avatar

    Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t realize that when I made this comment. Feddit.org is the replacement instance because of all the issues with feddit.de

    ericjmorey ,
    @ericjmorey@discuss.online avatar

    No one is ever satisfied with moderation.

    maegul ,
    @maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

    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

    PhilipTheBucket OP ,

    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.

    maegul ,
    @maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

    The RSS not seems cool! Is that open source some where?

    PhilipTheBucket OP ,

    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.

    maegul ,
    @maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

    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).

    PhilipTheBucket OP ,

    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.

    That’s a good idea. And then, if it turns into a mess of botspam, it’s not my fault.

    aaaa ,

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

    Lemminary ,

    So Lemmy.world? Err… welcome? 😅 jk

    PhilipTheBucket OP ,

    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.

    Elevator7009 , (edited )

    I started on kbin.social to get my feet wet and once I figured things out a bit I wanted off the flagship instance so I could help with decentralization. Purposely sought out a smaller instance, but I, like the user you replied to, needed faith it would keep running. Server age is useful. How many people joined is also somewhat useful—you'll probably have a harder time deciding to shut down an instance down on 100 active users than on 2, although it still happens (I used to be on kbin.cafe with around that number, the admin went inactive and the instance lived for awhile, but I checked now and get an SSL error. Shortly after the admin went inactive I went looking for somewhere new. kbin.run had around 100 active just like kbin.cafe, I went there, and clearly it worked out). I did not really need any fancy features, just for the instance to have a future while not being one of the biggest ones, and to not have a horrible reputation (like explodingheads does).

    You might get a new signup from me, already happy with my current instance, if your instance is devoted to an interest I like. If someone makes animals.social or bunnies.social and it gets more than 2 people to sign up, I'm definitely unsubbing from all my cute animal communities here and resubbing to them there. But I get the feeling you want to be general purpose. I don't think I'll need to make a new account anytime soon but if I do I'll come checking on yours.

    tomjuggler ,

    I had to be burned twice before learning this lesson - instances went down and I had to switch.

    otter ,

    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

    Blaze ,

    Nice comment.

    Just going to mention !piefed_meta as another interesting alternative

    SorteKanin ,
    @SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

    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.

    PhilipTheBucket OP ,

    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.

    Mpeach45 ,
    @Mpeach45@lemmy.world avatar

    It’s mainly about no Nazis.

    lvxferre , (edited )
    @lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

    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.

    PhilipTheBucket OP ,

    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.

    Die4Ever ,
    @Die4Ever@programming.dev avatar

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

    PhilipTheBucket OP ,

    Worked on, it sounds like.

    This is outstanding. What I was thinking was UI plugins or custom frontends per-user, effectively, so it would fill in a needed niche on top of the backend plugins. Maybe they’ve done something in the UI area already.

    This is really good to know.

    Die4Ever ,
    @Die4Ever@programming.dev avatar

    Well they’re still working on it. I don’t even think it’s planned to get into v0.20.0. They’ve been hoping to get feedback from people but they haven’t really gotten any feedback yet and not many people have tried making plugins for it yet.

    ericjmorey ,
    @ericjmorey@discuss.online avatar

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

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

    lvxferre ,
    @lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

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

    ericjmorey ,
    @ericjmorey@discuss.online avatar

    You may not have noticed:

    https://discuss.online/pictrs/image/cceca7b9-5c64-45cb-b073-3b7b87d3d956.png

    lvxferre ,
    @lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

    I didn’t! Now I feel like a muppet. Thank you for pointing it out.

    (Holy fuck I was in desperate need for something already there.)

    Blaze ,

    Thanks

    SorteKanin ,
    @SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

    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?

    lvxferre ,
    @lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

    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.

    Lemminary ,

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

    ericjmorey , (edited )
    @ericjmorey@discuss.online avatar

    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.

    Blaze ,

    You can undelete posts

    ericjmorey ,
    @ericjmorey@discuss.online avatar

    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.

    Blaze ,

    A while back, not sure when!

    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.

    Definitely

    baatliwala ,

    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

    rglullis ,
    @rglullis@communick.news avatar
    • 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.
    halm ,
    @halm@leminal.space avatar

    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.

    Blaze ,

    Reddthat.com disable downvotes, that’s something

    rglullis ,
    @rglullis@communick.news avatar

    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.

    Blaze ,

    I agree. A slashdot similar system would be nice

    What are tags?

    Tags are text labels you can add to a story that help categorize stories by content or category. Clicking the tag icon will open a text field for tagging. Type in a tag, then press the space bar. Repeat for all tags you’d like to add to the story.

    Note: Adding the same tag more than once does not increase its weight; once is enough. You might, though, tag a story about Western Digital hard drives “wd,” “westerndigital,” and “storage,” or a story about an MIT programming contest “programming,” “competition,” and “mit.” Tags help sort stories, and help you search for related ones. More tags help!

    Everyone can see them! Tags are public and flexible (rather than private and permanent). So one day, we might consolidate and change all “canine” tags to “dog,” say, or define new system tags and usurp more namespace. (Don’t say we didn’t warn you!) Because tags on Slashdot are public, and are used to inform the moderation system, tag abuse can hurt your karma. Please tag in good faith.

    The Firehose is powerful viewing tool for Slashdot content, from comments and journal entries to RSS feeds and story submissions. You can filter and interact with the Firehose in a number of ways. The plus/minus box on the left side of each Firehose entry lets you vote on that item. A context menu will appear when you click on the plus or minus, giving you the option of adding certain tags. You can also expand the submission if you’d like to add other tags, such as “northdakota” or “spaceflight.” Voting and tagging are helpful; they inform other Firehose users, and help the editors decide which ones make it to the front page.

    slashdot.org/faq

    PhilipTheBucket OP ,

    This is a very good idea. Slashdot hit on something very good with their scoring and moderation system, and then the lessons were forgotten in the systems that came after Slashdot.

    There are so many small tweaks like this tagging idea that would improve things, that I think the way to do it is a frontend “plugin” system that can accommodate them without it being a big fandango of tweaking the core to include fifty of these little nubbins all over the codebase.

    Nothing that’s ordained from on high will ever be completely perfect. If you can have a little text box on your custom frontend, where you can tweak your own UI features, and then talk with the instance admin about importing one of those little tweak plugins for the whole site, or for your own community only, that sounds like a huge step forward to me. If you’ve ever added little tweaks to Wordpress, with the custom CSS boxes or by adding a few lines to functions.php, I envision this being similar.

    This is all much more ambitious than I was thinking of when I asked this original question, but it would be a lot of fun to work on. If the result was it going back up into Lemmy, and each instance having its own collection of tweaks and a thriving community of people working on them without needing to disrupt the pace of development on the core, that would be a pretty excellent outcome.

    PhilipTheBucket OP ,

    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.

    rglullis ,
    @rglullis@communick.news avatar

    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.

    PhilipTheBucket OP ,

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

    I think, sadly, that either sending in your national ID or paying $10 would be unacceptable to so many people that it would make it a lonesome failure of an experiment. I’m on your side about the idea, but I think people would just take the path of least resistance and create their sockpuppets on some other instance, and your main accomplishment would be driving away legitimate users.

    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.

    I get it. Aren’t there projects that are working on that? Friendica and Emissary? Adding integrations with closed-source networks to those isn’t too hard. At that point, it’s not its own web app anymore, though, more akin to an email program. It’s a good idea but it’s different than what I had in mind. You will also have to deal with API limits or terms of service and legal issues, once you start looping in the closed-source networks.

    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.

    Yes, that part’s not overly hard. I’m already doing virtual servers for ponder.cat and rss.ponder.cat, to run them both on the same VPS, and I’ll probably add more virtual servers for development of frontend tweaks if I keep going with Lemmy. Some of the ideas I had in mind for hackable frontends involved wildcard virtual servers to serve people custom “instance” sites off a subdomain that’s different from the actual actor ID instance name.

    What I’m saying is that if someone’s actor ID from the POV of the rest of the Fediverse is still ponder.cat/u/rglullis, and ponder.cat goes down, nothing that either ponder.cat or any new instance can do, can “catch” requests that are being directed to that actor ID. You have to make the actor ID either rglullis.com/u/rglullis or rglullis.sometrustedthirdparty.com/u/rglullis from the beginning, and arrange for ponder.cat to be handling any traffic for those domains, so that you can switch away from the ponder.cat instance later on if you want to.

    Of course, you can tell people that they can either have a ponder.cat user, or a rglullis.com user if they want to buy their own domain for their user, and they can have an actor that will be transferrable from ponder.cat to any other Lemmy server that supports the feature. It wouldn’t work with current Lemmy, but in theory it could be made to work, if someone were willing to make the right Lemmy changes. It would be tough but it might be worth it.

    Overall I think it might be better to address the same issue at the protocol level as some other federated social media networks do, so you’re not introducing crazy new requirements on both the server and user experience side in order for people to be able to transfer their users later.

    rglullis ,
    @rglullis@communick.news avatar

    I think, sadly, that either sending in your national ID

    That’s why I mentioned the idea of “Zero Knowledge Proofs”. Using a ZK-proof, one should be able to prove ownership of an ID without having to reveal it to anyone else.

    At that point, it’s not its own web app anymore, more akin to an email program.

    Yes, exactly. I am not a fan of the current way that the Fediverse is working though, and I think it would be better to stop thinking in terms of “servers/clients” and more in terms of “distributed applilcations”.

    xnx ,

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

    PhilipTheBucket OP ,

    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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