Features & Changes For The New Pawb.Social Lemmy Fork

Some way of having multiple separate feeds would be very useful to me. I like having my furry stuff separate from my non-furry stuff, and I really need most of the NSFW stuff to be kept in its own little container. As it is now, this requires having three different accounts. More if I want to sort things further, which I likely will. This would be manageable if we had something like the RES account switcher but I'm not aware of anything like that for Lemmy.

Yeah, ultimately what I said above must apply, we can't break the experience for other Lemmy users, or others from the wider Fediverse (aka, we can't break userspace). Whatever changes we make will need to fit within those confines, with the exception being changes that can be pushed upstream, if the Lemmy devs will have any of it.

As for your suggestion, I absolutely agree. I meant to put that on there actually, as I often relied on that in Apollo. Favorites too, which I made use of in Infinity.

When there are changes to the base Lemmy project, those will be implemented in our fork, and when we feel there's a feature to push back upstream, we'll gladly do so.

We're also not making the fork specific to Pawb.Social, so things like the donation link will be customizable.

Adding notes to users (for moderation purposes)

Honestly would be cool if that could be done for anybody, not just admins / mods, like Reddit with RES. It lets you add something sort of like a flair to any user that only you can see. You can pick from a list of font colors and just add a short thing, it's very handy.

Addition: Allow for individuals to block instances and communities, instead of requiring instance-wide action to block them.

Don't we already have the ability to block individual communities on an user level? We certainly have a 'Block Community' button available, and it seems functional from what I can tell.

I'd love the ability to better filter and sort the communities list. In particular, I'd like to be able to filter (or sort) by communities I haven't subscribed to, or by communities by instance. I get that we can go to another instance and see their community list, but it's a bit of a PITA to subscribe or unsubscribe from there; ideally, we'd be able to do this within this community, so the sub/unsub links are present and functional.

2FA during login/sensitive actions like password changes.

Not sure if this is strickly backend, but some sort of 2FA would be really appreciated, like getting a one time password via email or having to enter a password from a TOTP app.

Addition: Ability to follow entire instance (or at least follow all communities on an instance).

Does there currently exist a way for one instance to poll another instance for their list of communities? I thought that an instance wouldn't even know a community exists unless someone specifically searches for it.

I know it's listed under backend, but wanted to ask about the front end plan for this feature. Let's say I search for Lemmy.world. Is the plan to output a checkbox list of communities and have us deselect any and confirm?

Change: Better support for automatically linking other communities (and instances) back to your primary instance for easier following and interaction.

Does this mean that finding and subscribing to communities on other instances will be streamlined? If not, that definitely needs to happen. The current process of going to another instance to search for a community there, copying a link, then going back to your home instance and searching for the community where you already know it doesn't exist is just mindbogglingly unintuitive. Hell, I can't even see NSFW communities on other instances even though my account is set to show them, and it seems like the only current way to fix that is to go to that instance and subscribe to one of its NSFW communities (that I can't see).

Community Approval!

Basically, an instance option that requires a new community to be approved by an admin when created, in the same way that a new user account would.

As far as I'm aware, currently there is no notification that a new community has been created and unless people are watching the local community list regularly, it's easy for them to slip by unnoticed. This allows scummy people to create a dodgy community, post a bunch of garbage to it and use it to attract more scummy people or start inter-instance drama.

User/community migration from one instance to another; I believe there is an open issue for this on the main Lemmy issue tracker. Dunno how far it's gotten, I'm sure it's a non-trivial thing to figure out.

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:

• Don't show nsfw posts from other instances in the "all" feed.
• Don't show nsfw posts in the "local" or "all" feed at all.
• Always show nsfw posts from communities the user is subscribed to, regardless of the above two options.

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.

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...

I'd love to be able to pick a default sorting method (perhaps per community).

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... [email protected] >> [email protected] 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.