this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024

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What do you want to have in a Lemmy instance? (ponder.cat)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/fediverse

94 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

The ability to ignore votes from other instances using an allow list. The ability to ignore votes in communities from unsubscribed accounts.

I see that your not talking about a Lemmy instance but a ui of a Lemmy instance. I think the biggest improvement from a UI perspective is button placement and confirmation messages for actions.

For instance, separate the delete post button from the edit post button and have a confirmation message for deleting a post so mistaken button presses aren't permanently unrecoverable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You can undelete posts

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

When did that get added? That's great!

Thanks for pointing that out.

But the buttons being too close is still annoying. That's only one example of buttons being too close too. A moderator can ban someone from a community and accidentally appoint that someone as a moderator. And confirmation messages for uncommon actions is just good UX too.

I think there's also a weird and inconsistent mix of buttons shown by default and hidden under a dropdown menu. There are many added clicks to do a lot of things for no gain.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

A while back, not sure when!

I think there’s also a weird and inconsistent mix of buttons shown by default and hidden under a dropdown menu. There are many added clicks to do a lot of things for no gain.

Definitely

[–] baatliwala 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Honestly at this point there's a fairly large number of instances so yours would need a selling point to even begin. And that's before taking things like owner behaviour and strictness into consideration because the instance theme and tools will always be the first impression.

"Generic catch all instances" are common. You can only build up a user base if existing people are willing to ditch their own. What are yours doing that the current ones do not?

Do you have a focus on a particular topic? I would consider posting a beautiful photo that I took on an instance dedicated to photography rather than the catch all one.
Is your UI unique/pretty? Which leads me to the next point...
Do you offer certain tools available/unique to your instance? 1) If yes, why can't they be integrated with base lemmy? It's open source after all. 2) If no for whatever reason (Lemmy devs slow to respond, low on their priority, will not accept, I don't agree with their behaviour etc) is there a reason it cannot be included on other existing instances? Why is it exclusive to yours?

And then I would start looking at the details like what would uptime be, how much are you yourself making an effort to contribute and expand, etc

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Proof of Humanity. There is some work about using Zero Knowledge Proofs as a way to be able to indicate that the owner of a key can also prove ownership of another set of credentials without having to reveal these credentials to third parties. This would allow us to really get rid of bots and sockpuppets.
The ability for users to bring their own cryptographic keys and actor id. This way even if a server goes down people could port their whole account over to a different server.
Multi-protocol federation.
Get rid of downvotes/upvotes and replace it with multi-dimensional scoring/ranking system.
User-defined sorting/ranking. I do not want to completely block people, but I do wish to have a system that could boost/de-emphasize posts by certain people on certain topics, and completely ignore them in others.
Cooperative media storage and distribution that could leverage the storage from clients as well as servers, something based on bittorrent.
Custom widgets that can be attached to a post/community. For example, I'd like to have a play-by-play tracker for basketball/football games.
RDF/Semantic Web descriptors. If people are talking about a TV show, or making a list of PC components that they want to review or anything that can be part of a knowledge graph should be linkable and browsable by a specialized browser.
Collaborative lists/articles/posts. With the item above, it would be trivial to create wikipedia-style posts where a community can build their "common knowledge" and would make it easier for newcomers to get general recommendations and/or a sense of the community values.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is by far my favorite set of suggestions. This is the kind of hackability fun instance that I would love to be a part of.

Proof of Humanity. There is some work about using Zero Knowledge Proofs as a way to be able to indicate that the owner of a key can also prove ownership of another set of credentials without having to reveal these credentials to third parties. This would allow us to really get rid of bots and sockpuppets.

Can you explain more? How would this do anything to prevent sockpuppets? I don't think they are preventable. I think the closest thing that exists is Something Awful's forums, where you have to pay $10 to participate and your user can be banned at the drop of a hat if you get out of line, and you're out $10. So you can run as many sockpuppet accounts as you want, as long as you feel like investing in what it'll take to keep making new ones.

That approach works perfectly on SA and I think there's something to it, but the $10 would be so shocking to the Fediverse mindset that I think it would be impossible for anyone to be on board with it.

The ability for users to bring their own cryptographic keys and actor id. This way even if a server goes down people could port their whole account over to a different server.

You can't bring an actor ID to a new domain name, can you? I can imagine an outlandish solution with each user registering their own domain for their actor, or having one provided by a guaranteed-trustable service, and then the server supporting those "foreign" actors, but it's definitely not easy. The idea of porting your stuff to a new server is an excellent idea but I think it's difficult to do with ActivityPub.

Multi-protocol federation.

Absolutely.

Pixelfed has support for most of the Fediverse: Lemmy's communities, Mastodon's groups, and Mastodon's microblogging. I'm thinking about messing around with Pixelfed before going any further with the Lemmy plan. Pixelfed might or might not work, but it might be a pure superset of what Lemmy can do, after some minor UI changes.

Get rid of downvotes/upvotes and replace it with multi-dimensional scoring/ranking system.

User-defined sorting/ranking. I do not want to completely block people, but I do wish to have a system that could boost/de-emphasize posts by certain people on certain topics, and completely ignore them in others.

This is one of the biggest things, to me. I messed around with some code to analyze the network of votes and make global determinations about users, and it worked well. Having the scoring and selection of posts being something that just has some quick math thrown at it but mostly left alone is a big missed opportunity to me.

Having a powerful hackable framework to customize the feed you're seeing, or add multiple feeds you can switch between, would be fantastic.

Cooperative media storage and distribution that could leverage the storage from clients as well as servers, something based on bittorrent.

I messed around with this too. It's not simple and I didn't get very far, but this is a very good idea to me. It also helps with hackability, because once you have that backing store that's using some model other than HTTP requests to nginx on the central instance, it's easy to make it writable for client-side plugins. It's a very, very ambitious thing but I like it very, very much.

Custom widgets that can be attached to a post/community. For example, I’d like to have a play-by-play tracker for basketball/football games.

Yes, exactly. I think once of the very next things on my list are seeing how realistically this kind of widget can be added to the Lemmy UI in a way that's customizable by the user. I think it's pretty easy. But all of this is work and work is hard, of course.

RDF/Semantic Web descriptors. If people are talking about a TV show, or making a list of PC components that they want to review or anything that can be part of a knowledge graph should be linkable and browsable by a specialized browser.

Collaborative lists/articles/posts. With the item above, it would be trivial to create wikipedia-style posts where a community can build their “common knowledge” and would make it easier for newcomers to get general recommendations and/or a sense of the community values.

This, I didn't think very much about. If there's a hackable framework for client-side tools, though, someone who wants to do these things should find it pretty easy.

This is exactly the type of thing I want to do.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Can you explain more? How would this do anything to prevent sockpuppets?

Imagine something like a verification check (like Twitter's old blue check) that is exclusively associated with your national ID. You can have only one of those. If you want to create sockpuppets, you'd have to convince someone else to (a) give them access to their ID and (b) be willing to lose their ability to prove their own identity elsewhere.

It's not absolutely safe against bots and sockpuppets, but it surely makes it more expensive than even a $10/account membership.

Pixelfed has support for most of the Fediverse.

PIxelfed is still just supporting ActivityPub. I'm talking about multi-protocol communication. A smart client should be able to let you communicate with Lemmy communities, subreddits, Facebook groups and all types of different platforms from a single unified interface. There are plenty of people that think this is something undesirable (like everyone that wants instances to block Threads), but I'd argue that building these integrations with closed platforms would eventually destroy them because they would lose the monopoly on network effects.

You can’t bring an actor ID to a new domain name, can you?

No, but you could have a web server that responds to multiple domains. Ideally, the server listening and responding to the AP requests should be able to work with multiple "virtual servers", instead of having to have only one instance == one domain that we today. AFAIK, only Takahe does this for microblogging.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Get rid of downvotes/upvotes

This. I haven't found a way to disable up/downvotes, even just their visibility in the UI. I understand the value of users rating post and comments, however I think the visible metrics turn Reddit and Lemmy alike into competitions for karma points rather than discussion.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Reddthat.com disable downvotes, that's something

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Having some sort of democratic non profit behind it like codeberg which seem to be doing really well (or like a cooperative bank), anyone can be a member as long as he pays fees that help projects for the instance (which could include paying bounties or freelancers for lemmy feature development). You would have a election where you vote for a board of directors or even just one "instance leader" or something like that and he or they decide what to fund or what mods to appoint or impeach. You could copy codeberg bylaws and it might actually work.

You could argue just letting basically average people elect management would lead to incompetent management (plato made the same arguments, your in good company), but this model has it advantages and seems to work well . The American Association for the Advancement of Science uses this model and created one of the most well regarded science journal in the world (science)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Management that has multiple conflicting ideology and walks of life but respect each other and has a professionalism and tolerance for people they disagree with and invite them to discuss instead of ruling with a iron fist like feudal fief lords.

[–] morphballganon 1 points 3 months ago

If there's a person (or bot) that claims to be unbiased but spams every political post with a biased assertion of the OP's partiality/impartiality with a huge post that is low effort copy+paste/script-generated, the correct response is to ban that person (or bot).

This is nothing new to online communities, but this instance seems to be struggling with this.

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