Now that Pawb.Social has forked Lemmy, I thought it would be appropriate to go ahead and compile a list of changes or additions that have been suggested, or that have been spotted by others or myself. This is hardly a comprehensive list, and down below will be two comments by me, one for changes to back-end changes or additions and one for the front-end suggestions as well.

A quick note before I start

One important thing I do want to stress is that any changes or additions made should not render our fork incompatible with other Lemmy instances, the apps that allows for easy usage of Lemmy (Jerboa, Thunder, etc), nor cause issues for interacting with, or interactions from, the rest of the Fediverse. To take a quote from Linux Kernel development: Don’t Break Userspace!

Now, let me specify for any who aren’t in the know about the differences between back-end and -front-end are:

  • Front-end: focuses on the user interface, designing the visual elements, and ultimately the UI elements that a user will interact with on the web page.

  • Back-end: deals with the server-side functionality, handling data processing, storage, and communication with databases and external systems (The rest of the Fediverse) using server-side programming languages and frameworks. For Lemmy, this is done with the Rust language.

Now, with that summary done, here is a (still WiP) list of changes:

Back-end

  • Addition: Individual community blocking (as opposed to the current instance and user-only blocking).
  • Addition: Ability to follow entire instance (or at least follow all communities on an instance).
  • Addition: Allow for individuals to block instances and communities, instead of requiring instance-wide action to block them.
  • Addition: Give instance admins better moderation tools (hashed IP address, etc. Needs to be GDPR compliant)
  • Change: Better support for automatically linking other communities (and instances) back to your primary instance for easier following and interaction.
  • Change: Better cross-compatibility between Lemmy and the Mastodon/Pleroma side of the Fediverse.
  • Change: Better cross-compatibility with KBin.
  • More to come

Back-end & Front-end

(For things that will require changes on both ends to function properly)

  • Addition: Post flaring - To allow for better post management, sorting, viewing, and moderation.
  • Addition: Ability to sort communities into groups (similar to multireddit).
  • Addition: 2FA during login/sensitive actions like password changes.
  • Addition: Mark servers and people as “friends” so they display a marker by their name elsewhere.
  • Addition: Better nsfw post handling, more specific viewing settings, etc.
  • Addition: Adding notes to users (for moderation purposes)

Front-end

  • Addition: Add more themes/theming support to the UI.
  • Addition: Add better support for widescreen displays.
  • Addition: Ability to pick a default sorting method (perhaps per community).
  • Change: Refresh and organize some of the UI elements for Lemmy (somethings are just a bit outdated looking…).
  • Change: Alter donation button at the top to point to the donation portal for the/an instance (this should be the default tbh, the prominent button shouldn’t direct to the Lemmy devs to begin with…)
  • Change: Move all information about Lemmy and the Lemmy devs to one, out of the way location, potentially as a citation in the footer.
  • Change: Add link pointing to the GitHub fork for Pawb.Social
  • More to come.

Please see below for the two threads to add your own thoughts or comments on things you want added, changed, or even removed. All comments and thoughts are welcomed!> ability to sort communities into groups (similar to multireddit).

  • FlowerTree
    12·
    1 year ago

    I have an idea, but I’ll be honest, I don’t know the difficulty of this idea. For back end & front end: The ability to sort communities into groups (similar to multireddit).

    I also wonder how we’ll implement all the changes on pawb.social to existing apps such as jerboa. While pawb should still be usable through the apps, features that don’t exist upstream probably won’t be available on the app either. We could fork these apps, but that would take too much resources.

    • Laurentide
      4·
      1 year ago

      Some way of having multiple separate feeds would be very useful to me. I like having my furry stuff separate from my non-furry stuff, and I really need most of the NSFW stuff to be kept in its own little container. As it is now, this requires having three different accounts. More if I want to sort things further, which I likely will. This would be manageable if we had something like the RES account switcher but I’m not aware of anything like that for Lemmy.

    • Southern WolfOPA
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, ultimately what I said above must apply, we can’t break the experience for other Lemmy users, or others from the wider Fediverse (aka, we can’t break userspace). Whatever changes we make will need to fit within those confines, with the exception being changes that can be pushed upstream, if the Lemmy devs will have any of it.

      As for your suggestion, I absolutely agree. I meant to put that on there actually, as I often relied on that in Apollo. Favorites too, which I made use of in Infinity.