this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Hey everyone! I'll be going through and making features for the site soon (as I've almost got my laptop back) and wanted to know if there was any features that are wanted that I dont already have noted down

I'm currently planning to do:

  • Customizable icon shapes (circle, hexagon, etc.)
  • Flairs
  • Ability to block an instance
  • Ability for admins or community mods to hide communities from the all feed
  • Community short descriptions (to show in the community list + top of sidebar)

And polls are also being worked on by snowe

Will try to get the changes merged into lemmy itself as well but they'll be released here first

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[–] popcar2@programming.dev 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Flairs and ability to block instances as a user would be soooooo nice. Thank you.

[–] mark@programming.dev 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've always felt like the blocking should happen at the user level and muting should be at the instance-level. Feels odd for admins be able to prevent users from seeing content.

[–] Reader9@programming.dev 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Feels odd for admins be able to prevent users from seeing content

My understanding is those admins aren't just allowing users to view it but also allowing copies of the federated data to be stored on the server those admins are responsible for, so for certain types of content it seems really important to be implemented in this way.

[–] mark@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

We're talking about blocking all content on an instance though--not necessarily a few nasty communities or posts or users. Blocking an instance blocks all content, including non-offensive content that may be posted by legitimate users.

For an admin to block everyone on an instance from all of their users just because of a few bad actors still seems weird to me. It's just gonna lead to every instance blocking each other, which destroys the experience for users and defeats the point of federation.

[–] Reader9@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Good point and I agree with the downsides. Giving admins more granular ways of hiding content sounds healthy.

There’s also the important distinction between admins finding opinions on the other instance “disagreeable” and muting vs. illegal content in the instance server’s jurisdiction and those of the admins. Defederating the whole instance does seem harsh if the problem is within specific communities only and doesn’t deal with illegal content.

Difficult problem!

[–] mark@programming.dev 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is great news! What happens if the Lemmy devs dont accept the changes upstream, though? 🙂

[–] Ategon@programming.dev 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Then it'll be a feature only in our site and any other sites using our version of lemmy

[–] mark@programming.dev 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh ok seems fine as long as the code continues to merge cleanly with upstream. But once that stops happening, could be hard to continue development without branching off and going our own way.

Will the custom code be open source and made available to us? If so, where would that be?

[–] Ategon@programming.dev 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Yeah should be fine, dont think any changes made are going to severely overhaul the base structure so everything will be able to merge in (and if it does change then makes sense to branch off at that point)

Yeah it'll be in a github repo. Currently trying to brainstorm a name and then I'll share the repo publicly

[–] mark@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

Awesome, can't wait to help contribute to the project!

[–] tatterdemalion@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

and if it does change then makes sense to branch off at that point

I really hope it doesn't come to that. I don't want to become a fork of Lemmy. I would consider going to a different instance if that happened, because I would need to weigh pros/cons of sticking to OG Lemmy dev team or programming.dev team.

[–] Ategon@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah very unlikely to actually happen. Even if it branched stuff could be shared between them, just would have to be adapted a bit

[–] philm@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't think this will be a very big issue for the majority of the cases though. As long as it's configurable and not a (very) controversial change. Especially, since I don't think that feature requests on a programming focused community will be that much controversial...

What I have observed so far: I think the maintainers are relatively open to changes (compared to a few other open source repos).

[–] WierdWebDev@programming.dev 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would like the ability to hide posts, that way I don't keep seeing posts I've already viewed or not interested in.

[–] philm@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pretty sure, that there's already a github issue on lemmy itself (too lazy currently to search it though)

[–] WierdWebDev@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

ah sorry, I was just going off the list in the OP. I'm fairly new here. (ah, i see "on lemmy itself," I'm not totally clear on how that works but that makes sense.)

[–] philm@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All good, well maybe not exactly the issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3580 (maybe you find something else there, otherwise, just open an issue there)

Also just discovered via this, that there's already a "Show Read Posts" setting in the settings

[–] WierdWebDev@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

My thoughts on show/hide "read" is that I don't necessarily want to hide all that i've read, not do I want to read all that I want to hide. I might want to keep some "read" ones on the feed in the event they get new posts.

[–] graphito 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Just listing some features I find valuable, some of them got issues already

  • Migrating communities to another instance
  • Ability to subscribe to communities in bulk
  • Notification for new communities on particular instance
  • subscribe to post replies when you're not the poster
  • mentions by username notification
  • subscribed + local/all feed together
  • local/all feed without subscribed
  • mark as read on posts
[–] canpolat@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is great. I think "instance post/comment links" would be a great addition to Lemmy core in general, but don't know how easy it would be to implement. What I have in mind is: when someone provides a link to a post/comment in another instance, it would be converted to a link the person is logged in from. I think it would be OK to leave the link as is but add an icon next to it that goes to the correct URL for that instance.

[–] Ategon@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah no idea how that would be connected. I know theres an extension that does it so I might need to look at the source for that

[–] canpolat@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I believe there is an API to convert such a link, but detecting that a link is going to a Lemmy instance might be difficult (or non-elegant).

[–] cacheson@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Should be able to just compare against the list of known instances. It'll miss the ones that aren't connected yet, but that should fix itself once someone subscribes to a remote community on the missing instance.

[–] canpolat@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, that's what I meant by non-elegant. I think the way Lemmy assigns IDs to posts and comments should be re-thought. Dictionary lookup is a solution, but not a good one.

[–] cacheson@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm, yeah, I see what you mean. Wasn't thinking about having to convert the IDs. Plus the actual local copy of the post needs to be available, not just a connection to the remote instance.

[–] canpolat@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

I believe there is an API to create a local copy, but I'm not sure

[–] qwertyasdef@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No idea how hard it would be but it would be nice to have code blocks with syntax highlighting like on Github, so you could write something like

```python
def f(x):
    return x
```

and get syntax highlighted code def f(x): return x

[–] Ategon@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah also have that planned as one of the first things I put in since we're a coding site, forgot to put it on the list. Shouldn't be that bad since there's libraries for it