I will not have this to offer to you, I think.
I think it's unrealistic for people to switch instances unless something has gone badly wrong with their existing one. New users are still a thing, though, and besides, if I know my instance is better than all the others, then I'll still feel happy about it.
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.
I agree on the customizability.
The community aspects that form a reason to join this instance specifically are key, of course, but I have none of that. I just made this place. Now I need to make it neat enough that at least one person sees some reason to join, instead of one of 200 other already-popular instances.
I think making the frontend more customizable would be good for Lemmy as a whole, and also if I'm tinkering with it on this instance, maybe that can give a flavor to the instance and give a benefit to people who do decide to come by. It is more ambitious than I was thinking of, but I just looked for a while and it is not insurmountable.
I spent a long time looking at it.
I think what it boils down to is hackability. The friction comes from people being unable to modify their experience, or the experience of their users, without going through this crazy process that involves it going all the way up to two Lemmy devs for the entire universe of users, and then something getting changed, and then it going all the way back down to the moderator or whoever, after the site admin upgrades the entire site. Or, going rogue and starting to change the code for their instance, which of course only the admin can do and voids the warranty.
I wasn't trying to become a Lemmy dev. I just wanted to make my instance neat, and I like to tinker. But I'm glad that people took the question seriously enough to give real, detailed answers about what would make things better. Lemmy is already designed to separate the backend and frontend very cleanly. I think it wouldn't be too hard (famous last words...) to make the frontend more hackable to make at least some of these into easier things to do at an end-user or end-administrator level.
It might be good to look at other software, too. I was thinking Lemmy, but the goal is the neat stuff, not the Lemmy part of it.
And if you could make the back button malfunction and then reload the page, and also open a dialog when I try to navigate away, that would be perfect.
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.
The pondercat rss bot can already do that. You can create a community that gets posts from any number of RSS feeds.
Well, you can't, but I can. I don't want to make it available for anyone to use yet, because I don't want an explosion of RSS spam, but if you want to connect some RSS feeds to a community and it's not going to become obnoxious, I can do that for you.
Hackable front ends, I think, could be a huge deal. I don't know how easy that is, but if it's possible for someone to run a modified version of the frontend just for them out of a subdomain, without it being a security nightmare, that would solve a lot of these issues of wanting an extra button on the report page, but having to have it go from you to the site admin to Nutomic back to a code update to a PR and back down the chain and so on, before it can get done.
With some web apps, that's easy, and Lemmy's frontend and backend are already nicely separated. I don't know if there have to be privileged things running in the frontend, though. I looked at it just now but I couldn't completely sort out how realistic it is. That might mean it's not very realistic.
Cory Doctorow pointed out recently that having pages be ugly and half-broken is an immune system against creeping corporate influence. Marketing people are incapable of making ugly pages without collapsing into fits, so if every page on your system is ugly and homemade, they won't be able to fit in there, and they'll have a harder time turning it all into shit.
Can the pages play music, and animated avatars? I feel like you're onto something.
/c/backpage
No no, that is a bad idea.
What's lacking in the moderation tools? I've heard a lot of people talk about the lack. What are some things that are hard to do?
Mobile apps will always lag behind. You're right, though. The Lemmy mobile interface is a terrible miniaturized version of the already not-great desktop interface.