I've always missed a rating/feedback/comment feature in F-Droid. A lemmy-based solution would be pretty cool.

Very cool idea. There are a lot of decent apps on fdroid where the only way to find out if the app is a good fit is to install it yourself. This would go a long way towards improving that experience.

I do think rating apps or install numbers would be great to better sort apps according to their usefulness. Number of installs/delivered updates are off the table because of how against telemetry the community is.

Ratings aren't necessarily useful since almost all apps on F-Droid are quite good at the thing they set out to do. The question is whether it's what I searched for. The biggest problem are outdated apps, which is pretty natural since life happens.

Comments are difficult because of spam and other unwanted content being posted. The F-Droid community are all volunteers and they have already enough to do.

Cool idea! THis should be more broadly discussed. After some discussion here, where could we share it with the F-Droid community? Is there a forum or such?

My five cents: The problem I see is account stuff. You can use F-Droid without an account, and do not want to require an account for ratings. Yet, having no accounts, it is incredibly easy to manipulate votings.

I would probably prefer a "Git Issue"-like thread for every app, where you have to register. This allows for

• Deeper conversation, more insightful reviews, instead of "3 starts, UI ugly" (let's face it, this is not the reason why we use F-Droid)
• Pointing out code lines in the source code. This could help with bug fixes, malicious stuff, etc.
• ...

Love the idea of this!

there was a fdroid client that did something similar using mastodon and hashtags but I can't remember which one it was and if it's still doing that