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?
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.
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.
You can undelete posts
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.
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
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
I want to have artistic and photographic content and make the interface less GTK-like, especially on mobile, to try to make it acceptable to the normal people. I am techie so I think it will always have a significant tech vibe, but yes. If it had about 80% fewer people talking about Linux and US politics, I think that would represent a big improvement in the experience.
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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
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No one is ever satisfied with moderation.
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.
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)
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.
I found out about the Trump assassination attempt from a chat room like this lol.
no fair!
dark souls wiki used to have it and it was fine!
I’ll make an AI chatbot that only wants to talk about Dark Souls. How about that, as a compromise?
i meant something like this https://darksouls.wiki.fextralife.com/Chatroom
if you scroll down you can comment without logging in, see everything is fine
honestly love this this idea. but I def think you need to at least be logged in
Hookers and copious amounts of cocaine.
What about women that don’t know they’re hookers yet?
/c/backpage
No no, that is a bad idea.
Have photon (phtn.app) as the default ui
Never said there isnt anothet instance that has it, just that having ot eoupd be cool.
Also that website runs an ANCIENT version of photon
You have not seen some photon instances lol. lemdro.id’s admins have been really busy, so I don’t blame them for anything. they’ve also been early supporters from the start of photon.
Here’s a list of ancient photon instances i’ve seen:
lemy.lol (so old that it literally crashes on load)
I really dislike when people host photon on their own stuff, and I prefer people use phtn.app. There’s greater chance for error and old versions can give people a negative view of the client.
AI post and comment assistant and an integrated crypto wallet. /s
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.
Thanks, I hate it.
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.
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.
Is this an early xkcd? The ending feels very “Cueball and Megan”…
That is exactly what it is, yes.
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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.
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.
a list of the most recent comments+posts in the community
Are the the moderator views not what you’re asking for here?
You may not have noticed:
Thanks
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.
Well they’re still working on it. I don’t even think it’s planned to get into v0.20.0. They’ve been hoping to get feedback from people but they haven’t really gotten any feedback yet and not many people have tried making plugins for it yet.
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.
Mobile apps will always lag behind. You’re right, though. The Lemmy mobile interface is a terrible miniaturized version of the already not-great desktop interface.
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.
I had to be burned twice before learning this lesson - instances went down and I had to switch.
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 started on kbin.social to get my feet wet and once I figured things out a bit I wanted off the flagship instance so I could help with decentralization. Purposely sought out a smaller instance, but I, like the user you replied to, needed faith it would keep running. Server age is useful. How many people joined is also somewhat useful—you’ll probably have a harder time deciding to shut down an instance down on 100 active users than on 2, although it still happens (I used to be on kbin.cafe with around that number, the admin went inactive and the instance lived for awhile, but I checked now and get an SSL error. Shortly after the admin went inactive I went looking for somewhere new. kbin.run had around 100 active just like kbin.cafe, I went there, and clearly it worked out). I did not really need any fancy features, just for the instance to have a future while not being one of the biggest ones, and to not have a horrible reputation (like explodingheads does).
You might get a new signup from me, already happy with my current instance, if your instance is devoted to an interest I like. If someone makes animals.social or bunnies.social and it gets more than 2 people to sign up, I’m definitely unsubbing from all my cute animal communities here and resubbing to them there. But I get the feeling you want to be general purpose. I don’t think I’ll need to make a new account anytime soon but if I do I’ll come checking on yours.
