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