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!
Allow people who fund the platform vote on features (that are pre approved ). who contribute more get more in return.
“time well spent”. and maximizing the “average quality of content”. maybe by allowing custom feeds. or feeds that are based only on the votes of trusted users. with governance models supporting how those feeds are managed like how KDE and GNOME nonprofits are managed. maybe vote on best post/comment of the day/week/year/decade with leaderboards for that.
Linus law of trail and error. allow people to easily extend the software .with plugins and ideally a store with reviews for addons like in firefox and chrome. making experimentation easier and safer (without risking adding a bad feature to all users of the software). vote on features implemented rating for example how satisfied you are on a scale of one to ten.
information over speculations . use A/B testing to see what works in practice. maybe use “counted statement” for example “this is useful” or “this is important” beyond lemmy and reddit upvotes and downvotes.
Right now a life changing post from world class expert and a funny cat picture with someone who spend too much time online are treated the same by the software. this should somehow change.
User sovereignty first design, where users individually control what instances they wish to block.
I agree with this. I think instance owners retaining ability to block other instances is still unfortunately necessary, if at least for administrative and legal reasons. But putting the onus on granular blocking controls on the user is a big achievement, as I prefer the user to retain that control.
you should look at the domain names of some of these blocked instances.
going live without a block list implemented upon start up is going to put you in a very serious legal quagmire where you are now responsible for your ISP having transmitted CASM.
That’s precisely why I call it necessary, you’re right!
Embrace content sorting and filtering algorithms, but on the client side, with optional control by the user.
You can only filter and sort what was downloaded by the client. So that runs into resource constraints.
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.
I’m so with you. https://xkcd.com/927/
Transferable user identity (between instances)
User identity and authentication as separate service from social network instance
That’s more the ATproto/Bluesky vision.
You can only filter and sort what was downloaded by the client. So that runs into resource constraints.
There shouldn’t be resource constraint issues in downloading new content Metadata from all your subscriptions
tags
When I say “standardize tags on all content”, what I mean is make it a standard to have the option of having tags on every type of content, and treat tags as a first class attribute of the content. The XKCD you reference is not relevant.
That’s more the ATproto/Bluesky vision.
Sure, they use it. But it is compatible with activityPub as well.
Radical interoperability. If I want to subscribe to this board via Gopher, or via Dialup modem, there should be an implemented way to do that.
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?
If we’re doing wishful thinking, I’d love an age and location mechanism.
Theres currently no way to do this with privacy and security in mind. Because it’s just a clusterfuck of issues.
But, again - wishful thinking. It would be cool hell to be able to actually have spaces for specific ages, or specific locations.
All the eurocentric communities forcing the end user to be from europe. Imagine a community for only 40-60yos, or a real teenager community without the creepos.
My city has a forum for each generation (millennials, gen X, etc) and the conversations and chats are lightyears better than anything else. We have RL meetups and BBQs. It’s a real community. Trolls quickly get booted and those who were assholes beg to come back after apologizing.
I think having instances or communities dedicated to that would be wonderful.
I think having separate identity providers would work well with this. Those identity providers could optionally verify age and location, and your instance can just trust them on that to make it exclusive to certain ages or locations.
design around ease of self-hosting. A non technical user must be able to self host easily and at a very low cost.
This may be a controversial opinion, but I actually like the way that hosting a lemmy instance is somewhat difficult to spin up. I like the way that it is requires a time investment and spammers can’t simply spin up across different domain names. I like the way that problematic instances get defederated and spammers or other problematic individuals can’t simply move domain names due to the way activitypub is tied to those.
In theory, you could set up something like digitalocean’s droplets, where a user does one click to deploy an app like nextcloud or whatever. But I’m not really eager to see something like that.
Transferable user identity (between instances)
I dislike this for a similar reason, tbh. If someone gets banned, they should have to start over. Not get to instantly recreate and refederate all their content from a different instance.
Of course, ban evasion is always a thing. But what I like is that spammers or problematic individuals who had their content nuked are forced to start from scratch and spend time recreating it before they get banned again.
As for what I would really like to see, I would really love features that make lemmy work as a more powerful help forum. Like, on discourse if you make a post, it automatically searches for similar posts and shows them to you in order to avoid duplicate posts. Lemmy does something similar, but it appears to only be the title. It would also be cool to automatically show relevant wiki pages, or FAQ content, since one of the problems on reddit was that people wouldn’t read the wiki or FAQ of help forums.
I would also like the ability to mark a comment on a post as an “answer”, or something similar. I think stackoverflows model definitely had lots of issues with mods incorrectly marking things as duplicate, but I think it was a noble goal to try to ensure that questions were only asked once, and for them to accumulate into a repository of knowledge. For the all the complaints about it, stackoverflow is undeniably the one of the biggest and most useful repositories of knowledge.
The first issue you bring up would be resolved with the idea of separating identity and authentication as separate providers from instance providers. In fact, it’s much better than just relying on a small difficulty, as that is more likely to discourage a well meaning non-technical person than a malicious actor.
Wktn separate identity providers, your instance can trust the identity providers that have good reputation. And if I want to be seen by your instance, then I have to have one of those identity providers approve me.
Different identity providers will have different standards and requirements.
I need the ability to send someone over and lightly slap other users if their comment reaches enough downvotes
