Radical interoperability. If I want to subscribe to this board via Gopher, or via Dialup modem, there should be an implemented way to do that.

1.- and I'm going to emphasize this a lot.

PAGING

(or at least some concept in the vein of "show only a finite amount of information at a time")

Lemmy does it well, but Mastodon sorely requires it for example. Anything that induces the pattern of autorefreshing, auto-filling, constantly changing timelines only empahsizes the addictions that antisocial media is working with already.

2.- More and better reactions than simply "upvote" and "downvote".

A upvote or a downvote can mean things in different categories, from "I don't like this" to "this is uninformative" to "this is misinformative!" to "enough Musk spam!". Condensing and factoring such results into how threads are found and sorted artificiates any or all of popularity, consensus and usefulness. So, being able to "react" (add a singular tag to a message without the need for a reply) to a message with more options than "upvote" and "downvote" would be useful. I'd count at least three axis (axeses? switchaxes?) that are useful to gauge: "agree - disagree", "informational - misinformational" and "verified - debunked".

3.- Global, or at least shareable and moveable, user identity. Won't comment on this more because others already cover it enough.

4.- Fucking decouple instance identity from DNS. DNS is the layer that big corpo will rein in next, depending on it to validate who an instance is is playing an eventually loser game.

Some instances already implement this, but a hard anti-AI stance or at least requiring labeling of AI-generated content?

For the threadiverse in particular I'd add transferable user created Communities (between instances).

User sovereignty first design, where users individually control what instances they wish to block.

Unified identity really needs a modification at the core of activpub. The issue at the moment is that a user is just an actor and an actor is just a url. What it needs to be is something like a did(distributed identity) which is what atproto (bluesky uses) does. And the did points to a list of actors that can be across multiple servers. The did has a private, public key pair and signs all activities by per server actors as ur user. What this means is u don't need to trust any server with login details or anything and u can do activities acting as any instance you want.

Uh, I'd love someone to have a try at full-blown direct democracy. Most aspects being controlled (and ideally owned) by the very same people who use the platform. Not sure if that's good or feasible, though.

And what I always love is to see design principles that foster a nice, amicable atmosphere. Some online communities, games etc have aspects of that. It's somewhat more rare on modern social media. I sometimes wish hanging out on the internet was a bit less about politics, trolling and memes, getting agitated amongst random anonymous people. And a bit more like an evening at the Irish Pub with friends. Or getting to know new friends there.
We do things like that. I just think good platform design still has potential to achieve way more than we currently do.

design around ease of self-hosting. A non technical user must be able to self host easily and at a very low cost.

This may be a controversial opinion, but I actually like the way that hosting a lemmy instance is somewhat difficult to spin up. I like the way that it is requires a time investment and spammers can't simply spin up across different domain names. I like the way that problematic instances get defederated and spammers or other problematic individuals can't simply move domain names due to the way activitypub is tied to those.

In theory, you could set up something like digitalocean's droplets, where a user does one click to deploy an app like nextcloud or whatever. But I'm not really eager to see something like that.

Transferable user identity (between instances)

I dislike this for a similar reason, tbh. If someone gets banned, they should have to start over. Not get to instantly recreate and refederate all their content from a different instance.

Of course, ban evasion is always a thing. But what I like is that spammers or problematic individuals who had their content nuked are forced to start from scratch and spend time recreating it before they get banned again.

As for what I would really like to see, I would really love features that make lemmy work as a more powerful help forum. Like, on discourse if you make a post, it automatically searches for similar posts and shows them to you in order to avoid duplicate posts. Lemmy does something similar, but it appears to only be the title. It would also be cool to automatically show relevant wiki pages, or FAQ content, since one of the problems on reddit was that people wouldn't read the wiki or FAQ of help forums.

I would also like the ability to mark a comment on a post as an "answer", or something similar. I think stackoverflows model definitely had lots of issues with mods incorrectly marking things as duplicate, but I think it was a noble goal to try to ensure that questions were only asked once, and for them to accumulate into a repository of knowledge. For the all the complaints about it, stackoverflow is undeniably the one of the biggest and most useful repositories of knowledge.

I need the ability to send someone over and lightly slap other users if their comment reaches enough downvotes