Fediverse

AI post and comment assistant and an integrated crypto wallet. /s

I would split it the question into two areas, I think you're looking into the second part?

Why would I join a particular instance (of any fediverse platform)

• High level rules/guidelines that align with what I want to see/avoid
• A few active admins that can remove harmful content / bad users quickly. Experience with moderation and devops would be nice
• If the instance "has a future" (backups, financials, long term plans)

Nice to have:

• located in my country or somewhere with better privacy/financial laws. That way I have a way to influence things
• plans to become (or run under) a not for profit

Why would I switch from Lemmy (software) to something else

Look at the discussion related to Sublinks where people talked about what they don't like about Lemmy. Some of the important points for me are moderation tools (ex. Automod), granular permissions for admins/mods, etc.

Would be nice

• Being able to follow users would be nice, Mbin/Kbin has that I believe?
• RSS feeds sure, but also being able to make custom feeds, similar to what "multireddits" were
• customizability would be cool, you can look at what userscripts and browser extensions people made to improve their Lemmy experience

Depending on your area of experience, you could look into contributing to Sublinks development. It's being developed in a way that allows Lemmy instances to migrate smoothly, and they could be open to adding new features to the roadmap

Well, I'm not looking to leave .world, but custom flairs for communities and better moderation tools would be the two big ones that are missing right now.

... also, charts of views/posts per month in a community. I like seeing the squiggly lines

Better mod tools. From a moderator (not admin) PoV:

• modmail
• ability to tag users and annotate things about them, preferably in a way that is visible for the rest of the mod team
• ~~a list of the most recent comments+posts in the community~~ EDIT - already there, as pointed out by ericjmorey. I feel dumb for not noticing it before.
• some sort of automatic warning, based on keywords

Specifically for the desktop browser interface (IDK how much it applies to other interfaces), it would be great if the [M] for moderator was a tiny bit less evident when you're just posting/commenting as a user, but there was a stronger highlight when speaking officially. Plenty times I feel the need to start the comment with [speaking as a mod], as that shield icon is easy to miss.

For admins I can't speak personally, but the list Beehaw admins provided seems IMO sensible.

It’s mainly about no Nazis.

People who are interested in and have knowledge on topics other than tech

Have photon (phtn.app) as the default ui

I want an instance already established, very populated, and proven to last long term, so I don't have to create another account

I want access to everything, fed users, customization, RSS integration, more and better tools. Hashtags that connect with mastodon like kbin would be cool.

Problem is I use mobile apps for lemmy so I'd probably not be able use any cool features. I tried for months on kbin's mobile site with and without scripts and it was still painful on my phone.

Honestly, I only want to see the posts I've upvoted but this is more of a feature request. 😅

Hookers and copious amounts of cocaine.

chat room to the side that anyone can use without logging in, but please add a CAPTCHA to it

Having some sort of democratic non profit behind it like codeberg which seem to be doing really well (or like a cooperative bank), anyone can be a member as long as he pays fees that help projects for the instance (which could include paying bounties or freelancers for lemmy feature development). You would have a election where you vote for a board of directors or even just one "instance leader" or something like that and he or they decide what to fund or what mods to appoint or impeach. You could copy codeberg bylaws and it might actually work.

You could argue just letting basically average people elect management would lead to incompetent management (plato made the same arguments, your in good company), but this model has it advantages and seems to work well . The American Association for the Advancement of Science uses this model and created one of the most well regarded science journal in the world (science)

• Proof of Humanity. There is some work about using Zero Knowledge Proofs as a way to be able to indicate that the owner of a key can also prove ownership of another set of credentials without having to reveal these credentials to third parties. This would allow us to really get rid of bots and sockpuppets.
• The ability for users to bring their own cryptographic keys and actor id. This way even if a server goes down people could port their whole account over to a different server.
• Multi-protocol federation.
• Get rid of downvotes/upvotes and replace it with multi-dimensional scoring/ranking system.
• User-defined sorting/ranking. I do not want to completely block people, but I do wish to have a system that could boost/de-emphasize posts by certain people on certain topics, and completely ignore them in others.
• Cooperative media storage and distribution that could leverage the storage from clients as well as servers, something based on bittorrent.
• Custom widgets that can be attached to a post/community. For example, I'd like to have a play-by-play tracker for basketball/football games.
• RDF/Semantic Web descriptors. If people are talking about a TV show, or making a list of PC components that they want to review or anything that can be part of a knowledge graph should be linkable and browsable by a specialized browser.
• Collaborative lists/articles/posts. With the item above, it would be trivial to create wikipedia-style posts where a community can build their "common knowledge" and would make it easier for newcomers to get general recommendations and/or a sense of the community values.

Honestly at this point there's a fairly large number of instances so yours would need a selling point to even begin. And that's before taking things like owner behaviour and strictness into consideration because the instance theme and tools will always be the first impression.

"Generic catch all instances" are common. You can only build up a user base if existing people are willing to ditch their own. What are yours doing that the current ones do not?

• Do you have a focus on a particular topic? I would consider posting a beautiful photo that I took on an instance dedicated to photography rather than the catch all one.
• Is your UI unique/pretty? Which leads me to the next point...
• Do you offer certain tools available/unique to your instance? 1) If yes, why can't they be integrated with base lemmy? It's open source after all. 2) If no for whatever reason (Lemmy devs slow to respond, low on their priority, will not accept, I don't agree with their behaviour etc) is there a reason it cannot be included on other existing instances? Why is it exclusive to yours?

And then I would start looking at the details like what would uptime be, how much are you yourself making an effort to contribute and expand, etc