Welcome

Hello everyone,

I can tell there is a lot of interest in a tool to enhance the mod abilities of Lemmy.

I’ve been researching ways to do it. I have six options that I’m considering.

I’m trying to keep the topics high-level and avoid implementation discussions.

These are undeveloped high-level thoughts. I still have a lot of research into the Lemmy code base and ActivityPub.

It’s late for me, so these notes are from a stream of thought. There may be changes as I think more about this or get community feedback.

Option 1 - SaaS

Summary

A service I host. Probably maintained by donations. I might have an additional tier for enhanced moderation tools.

Pros:

• Simple setup/registration.
• No additional hosting cost for Lemmy admins.
• Ability to use community-shared moderation.
• Community data analysis to find bad actors across the federation.
• Quicker to develop. No need to worry about tech support, setup, configuration wizards, etc.
• Could be set up with any ActivityPub instance. (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.).
• If successful, it could be my full-time gig.
• I would be more engaged

Cons:

• I have to store personally identifiable information & manage other compliance regulations.
• Feature releases are limited to a single pipeline.
• You don’t get your data.
• No direct DB access to do advanced queries and changes.
• Limited by ActivityPub capabilities.

Option 2 - Self-hosted

Summary

Admins would have to install, set up, and maintain the software.

Pros:

• No cost for me to run anything.
• Admins store their data.
• Direct access to databases to do advanced querying.
• Open source community project requiring/allowing outside development

Cons:

• Additional network traffic if shared moderation is used.
• Link flooding and spam tracking across instances aren’t as likely to exist.
• Would mostly be purpose-built for Lemmy. No additional federation support.
• I would be less engaged and rely on community support

Option 3 - SaaS that requires a self-hosted service

Summary

This is sort of a mix of the above. The interface and interaction are central; however, an agent must be installed to interface with the Lemmy instance.

Pros:

• Best of both worlds.
• A custom API could be built to work with the adapter service. Not limited by ActivityPub.

Cons:

• Worst of both worlds.
• Purpose-built for Lemmy to start. (Adapters for other systems could be built).
• More complex to build.
• Additional server cost and maintenance. More complicated setup for admins.

Option 4 - SaaS & Self-Hosted

Summary

You could use the SaaS solution or install it locally.

Pros:

• I could charge for SaaS to finance the project.
• All the pros of SaaS and Self-hosted
• The people have choice

Cons:

• More complex to build
• All the cons of SaaS and Self-hosted

Option 5 - Ask the devs to do it

Summary

We tell the devs of Lemmy to include better tools and how we want them.

Pros:

• Less work for me/us
• Moderation built into Lemmy and not a separate app

Cons:

• We have to wait for them to do it all
• They might say no

Option 6 - Contribute to the dev repo

Summary

Build enhancements to the core of Lemmy’s moderation tools.

Pros:

• Community support to add features
• Users only have to update to get new features, no configuration
• No additional server costs

Cons:

• Only works on Lemmy
• Lemmy becomes a Monolithic application - scaling challenges
  • Pro: A flag could be added to only enable moderation-specific scheduled tasks on a single instance.