For example, for me, here are some things I wish to see (or would implement in my design) :
- design around ease of self-hosting. A non technical user must be able to self host easily and at a very low cost.
- Embrace content sorting and filtering algorithms, but on the client side, with optional control by the user.
- Standardize tags on all content. So many of the different ways different platforms classify or organize content can be implemented as tags, which increases interoperability between them.
- Abandon obsession with real-time-first implementations for use cases that don’t explicitly need it.
- Transferable user identity (between instances)
- User identity and authentication as separate service from social network instance
Would love to hear yours!
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.
I’m so far paging, and it’s so annoying this isn’t the default design on the fediverse.
On 4, I also agree, but what’s the best alternative?