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.
Bring back <blink> and <marquee> elements.
Can we also get a MIDI file to play at full volume whenever I open Lemmy?
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.
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.
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
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)
Nice to have:
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
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
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. Oh, and a common chat room thing for mods.
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.
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.
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.
Better mod tools. From a moderator (not admin) PoV:
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?
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.
It’s mainly about no Nazis.
People who are interested in and have knowledge on topics other than tech
I want an instance already established, very populated, and proven to last long term, so I don't have to create another account
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.
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.
Honestly, I only want to see the posts I've upvoted but this is more of a feature request. 😅
chat room to the side that anyone can use without logging in, but please add a CAPTCHA to it
chat room to the side
Perfect.
that anyone can use without logging in
Absolutely not.
Hookers and copious amounts of cocaine.
Sad to say that we're all out of hookers. I hope this copious amount of cocaine is enough. :(
/c/backpage
No no, that is a bad idea.
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
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.
The RSS not seems cool! Is that open source some where?
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.
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
