I started up my own instance and now I have realized that there’s no reason anyone would join mine instead of any other instance.
That’s no good. What neat stuff would the Fediverse like to see in a Lemmy instance?
- Follow RSS feeds in your Lemmy feed? I have that already, in a way, but it would be nice to be able to do it for any feed automatically without it being clunky.
- Follow Mastodon users? Or tags?
- Embedded video? That seems costly.
- Hackability? The ability to run your own customized front end? Or good scripting features in the browser console?
- A better looking UI? This one is functional but it’s not pretty.
- Better moderation? I have heard the Lemmy tools aren’t that good.
- Something else?
For me, I think, to pass a report ‘up the chain’ to the admins, either to alert them of instance rules being broken (spam, questionable content, etc), or of a user abusing the report feature. ‘Report’ having more than “Yes I’ve seen it” as an option in notifications would be nice. A dedicated ‘modmail’ would be welcome too, as right now you play moderator roulette trying to figure out who to talk to when there’s more than one moderator. Oh, and a common chat room thing for mods.
I think hackability can go a long way towards this.
Especially on the frontend, there’s no reason Lemmy shouldn’t have custom “plugins” to change its behavior in certain ways. I think the issue isn’t that the Lemmy developers don’t want these things to exist that you’re talking about, so much as them being the only ones in a position to make the changes or accept the PRs to make them happen. Of course in that situation, change will be slow and progress limited.
Me making changes to the frontend that intensive, or anything like it, was a bigger scope of change than I was expecting. I just wanted to make some tinkering things for my instance. But it wouldn’t be impossible. And you could have your charts. Even little blinking lights and things.
Let me mull it over for a while.
Lemmy maintainer here, and I’m really curious what gave you this idea. We generally welcome all contributions to the project. On the backend I made a pull request to add plugin support which is waiting for feedback. Onthe frontend I havent heard any interest in a plugin system yet.
So if this is something you want, you’re welcome to implement it and open a pull request.
I completely agree. Maybe my phrasing was careless. I wasn’t trying to be critical of the pace of accepting PRs or anything. I only meant that I think more flexibility in the frontend would help, instead of needing any minor UI change to go all the way through a cycle all the way up to you, incorporating it into the core codebase, and then filtering back down to an upgrade by the instance admin. But please don’t take it as blaming you for any of that situation. I was raising it in the effort to propose a solution and also to advocate against people just complaining about the moderation tools and then moving on, and waiting for you to make them happy.
I did look at the backend plugin system PR, although sadly not enough yet to have any opinion or feedback on it. I do think a frontend plugin system, of sorts, could help a lot. I’m not sure when I will have time but I will try to put together something on this instance to show what I’m talking about, and if I do wind up doing it and it’s well received, I am completely open to putting it together as a fixed-up and official PR for the main codebase.
Yes that sounds like a good idea. Unfortunately lemmy-ui isn’t getting many contributions so development is rather slow, but contributions are always welcome. I don’t work on that project myself, so I suggest you discuss it in the dev chat on matrix to make sure your approach will actually work.