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?
AI post and comment assistant and an integrated crypto wallet. /s
Can the pages play music, and animated avatars? I feel like you’re onto something.
Can we also get a MIDI file to play at full volume whenever I open Lemmy?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 communityEDIT - 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.
a list of the most recent comments+posts in the community
Are the the moderator views not what you’re asking for here?
The mod view only shows you the posts, not the comments. To see the newer comments you still need to open each post individually.
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.
the Lemmy devs are currently working on a plugin system https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4695
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.
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?
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.
