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:
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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.
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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).
Comment here for any suggestions for Front-end development!
Not sure where the settings actually live, so I can’t say whether this is backend or frontend, but I have been thinking that nsfw post handling could be improved.
Specifically, I’ve been thinking about (and actually been considering implementing) some new per-user settings:
Should cut down on any drama caused by someone registering on a random instance and subbing to gfur. :P
EDIT: Looking at the replies, it looks like a simple site wide toggle a-la Furaffinity might be easier to implement and more egonomic.
I think we can simplify your idea as a setting or toggle to allow user to enable or disable NSFW on “Local,” “Subscribed,” and “All” feed separately.
To add to that, a simple NSFW toggle above the feed (such as near the sort options) should help, so user can enable and disable NSFW with one click on the feeds page, instead of having to go through settings. I don’t really like seeing nsfw posts when I’m not in the mood.
I’d love that simple NSFW toggle. I want to see NSFW posts sometimes, but I have a kid, so any time when he’s potentially around, I absolutely do not. Going into settings to change it is very annoying.
I’d love to be able to pick a default sorting method (perhaps per community).
Even better would be customizable sorting algorithm.
The ability to hide posts, and/or auto-hide read posts.
This will be a HUGE improvement.
Can’t avoid those pinned posts when sorting by Hot/Active/Top of day, for example…
Came here to suggest an ‘Unread’ filter option; auto-hide read posts covers it. I think that’s the single biggest problem I have right now. There’s a lot of content out there but it’s very hard to find it if you’re just sitting here scrolling for a while, because you continually see the same things getting sorted to the top.
Adding notes to users. For example for moderation purposes.
Also for moderation purposes (will likely require both front and backend):
-Give site admins the ability to view user last few ip addresses and emails, but display them as a hash so that we in Europe can onboard admins without having to worry about disclosing personal data of our users and its impact in current legislation. This data could be hashed with salt that’s specified by the server admin as an environment variable or in the config files.
123.123.123.123 >> 4fc174d62e… john@gmail.com >> e375fab75@gmail.com or e375fab75@g***l.com
Ability to block sign up of specific email domains
Secondary site admin role that has no ability to purge content from the database.
Highlighting of new comments that have been posted since you last visited that comment section, similar to what Reddit does if you have their gold subscription. In my opinion this is an essential feature that needs to be available to everyone if you want to encourage actual discussion rather than drive-by opinion dumping.
The larger a comment section gets, the harder it becomes to find any particular comment chain you were interested in, so most threads devolve into two people having an argument (because direct replies trigger notifications) or everyone just shouting their opinion into the void and then leaving forever. There’s no point in ever coming back because you’ll never find anything again unless someone responds to you personally.
[EDIT: There’s some kind of auto-refresh that happens occasionally and it looks like it might highlight new comments, but it also unhighlights them on the next refresh so you could end up with new comments marked as old ones if you don’t read them in time. It may just be my inexperience with the platform, but this feels confusing and inconsistent.]
In that vein, anything to better visually organize comment sections or get more of the section onto the screen at once would be very welcome. Maybe all that empty space to the left and right could be put to use somehow?
This probably requires a bit of backend to store the data too but maybe a way to mark servers and people as “friends” so they display a little marker when you see them in the wild.
I’ve been using this userstyle to do it on a server-basis and I love seeing friends in unexpected places. I’ve seen a few one-off people that posted really great content and thought “wow I wish I could keep track of them”. Marking them so I can spot them in the wild, and maybe being able to scroll through my marked people’s comments in a feed would be neat.
This sounds similar to the user tagging feature in Reddit Enhancement Suite, which I believe is done client-side. I’ve found it useful for lots of reasons and having it built-in might allow for even more functionality. Another similar feature I’ve seen elsewhere is the ability to add private (only visible to you) notes to profile pages.
Yeah you’re right. I actually modified my userstyle to mark certain people in the meantime, but having a dedicated way to do it would be cool. RES was built because reddit wouldn’t implement the changes - we now have the power to implement RES-like features into lemmy itself if we want.
Collapsing comment threads.
One thing I sorely miss from Reddit is the ability to collapse a comment chain when I’m done reading it. Makes reading long chains much easier. This could be done like on new Reddit by clicking the colored bar on the side of a comment, if it was a bit wider.
That functionality already exists, at least on desktop. There’s a little box just to the right of your name that appears to collapse the entire thread when you click on it. What would be a helpful addition is some way to collapse a thread from the bottom, so I don’t have to scroll back up when I’m done reading that thread. Clicking the color bar sounds like a decent way to accomplish that.
I also miss having the line separators between threads like you can enable on Old Reddit.
Ahh I see. I never paid proper attention to the icons; it’s hard to distinguish what everything is when most buttons don’t even have outline. This was weird because the minus is inside a box.
But yeah, definitely still miss the click on the line which allows you to collapse from bottom (though you also need to automatically scroll “up” to the collapsed thread). That’s how it works in new Reddit.
What do you mean by line separators? I don’t really remember old Reddit.
Oh and just now I found out another thing: you can’t submit reply with Ctrl+Enter.
Yeah, the whole UI needs an update. Why are most of the icons below each post hidden behind a “more” button when there’s plenty of room to show them all? I even need 120% zoom just to distinguish everything on the page.
In Old Reddit, or maybe it’s in RES, there’s an option to add a horizontal red line between comment threads.
This is what it looks like.
It’s a helpful visual indicator for knowing when you’ve hit a new top-level comment. Here in Lemmy the red bar on the left serves the same function, but it doesn’t break between adjacent top-level comments so it fools my brain into thinking the whole block is one big comment.
Ahh I see, it’s probably a RES thing. And I agree, it’d be nice to have it here from the top level comment… Which we now do, nice!
To be fair there is a ton of them. I find it hard to find what I need (reply, usually) when it’s expanded. Especially in inbox. But if all had some color (why just ONE?) or a separator between logical sections it’d probably work fine.
I’m curious if y’all have considered merely switching your default frontend.
Photon recently reached feature parity with lemmy-ui and appears to be improving at a faster pace than the official UI.
Heh, it’s funny you mention this… Let’s just say some things are in the works for that. :)