Now that Pawb.Social has forked Lemmy, I thought it would be appropriate to go ahead and compile a list of changes or additions that have been suggested, or that have been spotted by others or myself. This is hardly a comprehensive list, and down below will be two comments by me, one for changes to back-end changes or additions and one for the front-end suggestions as well.
A quick note before I start
One important thing I do want to stress is that any changes or additions made should not render our fork incompatible with other Lemmy instances, the apps that allows for easy usage of Lemmy (Jerboa, Thunder, etc), nor cause issues for interacting with, or interactions from, the rest of the Fediverse. To take a quote from Linux Kernel development: Don’t Break Userspace!
Now, let me specify for any who aren’t in the know about the differences between back-end and -front-end are:
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Front-end: focuses on the user interface, designing the visual elements, and ultimately the UI elements that a user will interact with on the web page.
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Back-end: deals with the server-side functionality, handling data processing, storage, and communication with databases and external systems (The rest of the Fediverse) using server-side programming languages and frameworks. For Lemmy, this is done with the Rust language.
Now, with that summary done, here is a (still WiP) list of changes:
Back-end
- Addition: Individual community blocking (as opposed to the current instance and user-only blocking).
- Addition: Ability to follow entire instance (or at least follow all communities on an instance).
- Addition: Allow for individuals to block instances and communities, instead of requiring instance-wide action to block them.
- Addition: Give instance admins better moderation tools (hashed IP address, etc. Needs to be GDPR compliant)
- Change: Better support for automatically linking other communities (and instances) back to your primary instance for easier following and interaction.
- Change: Better cross-compatibility between Lemmy and the Mastodon/Pleroma side of the Fediverse.
- Change: Better cross-compatibility with KBin.
- More to come
Back-end & Front-end
(For things that will require changes on both ends to function properly)
- Addition: Post flaring - To allow for better post management, sorting, viewing, and moderation.
- Addition: Ability to sort communities into groups (similar to multireddit).
- Addition: 2FA during login/sensitive actions like password changes.
- Addition: Mark servers and people as “friends” so they display a marker by their name elsewhere.
- Addition: Better nsfw post handling, more specific viewing settings, etc.
- Addition: Adding notes to users (for moderation purposes)
Front-end
- Addition: Add more themes/theming support to the UI.
- Addition: Add better support for widescreen displays.
- Addition: Ability to pick a default sorting method (perhaps per community).
- Change: Refresh and organize some of the UI elements for Lemmy (somethings are just a bit outdated looking…).
- Change: Alter donation button at the top to point to the donation portal for the/an instance (this should be the default tbh, the prominent button shouldn’t direct to the Lemmy devs to begin with…)
- Change: Move all information about Lemmy and the Lemmy devs to one, out of the way location, potentially as a citation in the footer.
- Change: Add link pointing to the GitHub fork for Pawb.Social
- More to come.
Please see below for the two threads to add your own thoughts or comments on things you want added, changed, or even removed. All comments and thoughts are welcomed!> ability to sort communities into groups (similar to multireddit).
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.
That functionality already exists, at least on desktop. There’s a little box just to the right of your name that appears to collapse the entire thread when you click on it. What would be a helpful addition is some way to collapse a thread from the bottom, so I don’t have to scroll back up when I’m done reading that thread. Clicking the color bar sounds like a decent way to accomplish that.
I also miss having the line separators between threads like you can enable on Old Reddit.
Ahh I see. I never paid proper attention to the icons; it’s hard to distinguish what everything is when most buttons don’t even have outline. This was weird because the minus is inside a box.
But yeah, definitely still miss the click on the line which allows you to collapse from bottom (though you also need to automatically scroll “up” to the collapsed thread). That’s how it works in new Reddit.
What do you mean by line separators? I don’t really remember old Reddit.
Oh and just now I found out another thing: you can’t submit reply with Ctrl+Enter.
Yeah, the whole UI needs an update. Why are most of the icons below each post hidden behind a “more” button when there’s plenty of room to show them all? I even need 120% zoom just to distinguish everything on the page.
In Old Reddit, or maybe it’s in RES, there’s an option to add a horizontal red line between comment threads.
This is what it looks like.
It’s a helpful visual indicator for knowing when you’ve hit a new top-level comment. Here in Lemmy the red bar on the left serves the same function, but it doesn’t break between adjacent top-level comments so it fools my brain into thinking the whole block is one big comment.
Ahh I see, it’s probably a RES thing. And I agree, it’d be nice to have it here from the top level comment… Which we now do, nice!
To be fair there is a ton of them. I find it hard to find what I need (reply, usually) when it’s expanded. Especially in inbox. But if all had some color (why just ONE?) or a separator between logical sections it’d probably work fine.