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?
  • parpol@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Fair moderation. The biggest problem with the largest instances is that they are heavily skewed towards communist ideals and censorship, and mods will ban you for holding (locally) controversal opinions despite not breaking any rules. And sometimes the rules are too arbitrary and get used as a scapegoat to ban you for your opinion.

    Programming.dev has been a very good example of how moderation should be done, but it is for programmers, thus may not be appealing to the typical user, and they end up on lemmy.ml instead and get banned because the mod was in a bad mood and didn’t like your opinion.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOPEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      I saw that already. Programming.dev was right away on point about hiding some of my RSS bot’s posts, unless the users were subscribed, because it was spamming their users’ feeds and they didn’t want that. They’re clearly invested in their users having a good experience instead of, I guess, wanting to order them around? I’m not familiar but it looks like programming.dev is doing it right.

      I agree. The moderation on Lemmy is halfway to Reddit’s. There are random rules for no reason. I don’t fully get it.

    • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      You make a valid point but I just want to push back a bit. These are the largest Lemmy instances in order of monthly users

      large instances

      As far as I know, lemmy.ml and hexbear are the only heavily communist and censorship prone servers out of the top twelve. They were here first, but we really need to stop perpetuating the notion that they represent or dominate Lemmy as a whole, along with the idea that they represent a typical moderation experience on this platform.

      I feel like the numerous well-moderated instances don’t get enough credit. The actions of lemmy.ml moderators tend to shape the narrative about Lemmy moderation, which is unfair to other servers and repels new users from the platform. Other instances aren’t perfect with moderation either, but at least they generally try to moderate in good faith and with some degree of neutrality, which is the most you can really ask for.

      The primary influence that remains is lemmy.ml still hosts a disproportionate number of major communities, but that’s slowly changing.