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).

  • Laurentide
    3·
    2 years ago

    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?