Model aligns with Reality.

A wishlist for two categories, in each sorted from very important to less important:

Technical:

• Open all links relative to my home instance (I want to stay logged in)
• Make community discovery easier and consistent. One method, which always works.
• Move account to another instance, complete with subscriptions and notifications when older comments receive replies
• Clarity: I’m often confused in which community a post lives, or where it originated. Or what a user’s home instance is. It is fine to display relative information (Post X from instance Y as seen from instance Z), if clearly less emphasized
• Indicate who can see a post or comment. From what instances is that content visible?
• Display the same community stats regardless from which subscribed instance they are viewed (subscriber count varies wildly)

View:

• Allow to hide selected posts
• Expand and collapse images in threads
• Lock my feed: Please don’t add posts to the top while I’m browsing the thumbnails at the bottom
• Display post/comment live preview below input field, so I can see the preview while editing. Currently I must switch view.
• Search within a community (without leaving the community page)
• Customize your feed: Control how much of each community is displayed (I want posts from some small communities to always show, and posts from others to only show rarely, or only those with votes/comments)

This was meant with the web/browser in mind. I expect apps and clients to work similarly, unless a characteristic necessitates exceptions (screen size, touch, …).

i can see comments from explosive heads users, which unfortunatly, my instance (lemmy grad) is still federated with them

https://lemmygrad.ml/instances

https://fba.ryona.agency/?reverse=lemmygrad.ml

Both see exploding-heads.com blocked by lemmygrad.ml, apparently since 2023-06-15. Are the comments you see older than this? You shouldn’t see any e-h activity on lg communities after that date. Or you’re viewing the local copy of a lemmygrad community on exploding-heads, but in this case you should only see e-h comments after that date.

I also really enjoy knowing I literally own all my own data. It’s stored locally on my personal server.

As far as I understand the fediverse, that’s not necessarily the case. Let’s take a local community with a post or comment of yours as an example, and see how it could go wrong.

When users from other instances subscribe, the community is copied to their instance, including your content. If federation is broken, or any of the two instances go offline, you can still change or delete your local data, but not the remote copy.

Allow a user to block an instance #2397

You can contribute, encourage others to contribute, post a bounty or leave a thumbs up, or wait.

Another option is to block communities, you can already do that on your own.

over time people will get bored with self hosting lemmy and move onto other things

I wouldn’t worry about that. At the same time, new people join lemmy. Most as users, but some as admins, and even a few as developers. At the moment, I believe the increase in new servers is way more capacity than we need for new users.

Looking around this thread made me happy (thanks for creating it!). It seems many people host for very admirable reasons, sometimes explicitly unselfish. I am grateful for this and totally fine when one of those people decides to step down for whatever reasons. It’s all part of the beauty of freedom.

From a user’s point of view, one might worry that users could be forced to move when an instance shuts down. Happened to me. Not great, but a piece of cake compared to migrating from another platform.

For statistical reasons, we can probably assume that most users will end up in stable instances with very few to zero moves.

I expect the main cost of servers are the hosting of subs, not maintaining users.

Which is easy to avoid, if you want. You can disallow the creation of communities on your instance.

So users can still join and make it their home, but they will have to subscribe to communities on other instances.

I’m not sure about the ethical implications. It means you’re sort of leeching off moderation and maintenance from other admins.

I guess it’s a negligible point and totally fine, but not sure. Would be interesting if community-admins could share their thoughts on this.

I sent some of the overflow to lemmy development

I was hoping for something like that the other day. Makes me happy to see it happening! Thank you :)

Recently, I had the most success searching for the full external URL: https://kbin.social/m/news

It seems to be important to search for ‘All’, not for ‘Communities’.

I tried searching for news@kbin.social and !news@kbin.social. These approaches also sometimes work.

If you are the first person from your instance searching for a community or magazine on another instance, it will not show up at first. Only if you search again a few seconds later, it shows up.

Not sure if I want to know how you unlock your phone.

Common methods are fingerprint detection, face recognition, iris/retina scanning.

make signing up computationally expensive. Some javascript that would have to run client side, like a crypto miner or something, and deliver proof to the server that some significant amount of CPU power was used.

Haha, I like this one! Had to strike a balance between ‘make it annoying enough to deter bots’ and ‘make it accessible enough to allow humans’. Might be hard, because people have vastly different hardware. Personally, I probably would be fine waiting for 1s, maybe up to 5s. Not sure if that is enough to keep the bots out. As far as I understand, they would still try (and succeed), just be fewer because signup takes more time.

I also like the side-effect of micro-supporting the instance you join with a one time fee. I expect haters to hate this quite a lot though.

I used to be a huge apple fanboy, until i learned i prefer android and linux way more. i know that’s kind of a lame example but it was the first time i became aware of what you’re talking about and opened the door to me thinking critically about other things

That is perfectly fitting. Thank you for understanding what I meant and expanding with details. I can totally relate to everything you wrote.

I find the example about taste or preference particularly interesting, since there is no objective answer. Still, the mechanics are similar. It is easy to commit to one particular idea, to one specific self-image. But maybe ‘you’ aren’t exactly what you thought you’d be? Being more humble and open can be a liberating experience.

On a related note, I strongly recommend playing theater, especially for everyone who believes they cannot do it.

I forgot the details, but I remember vividly the strong feeling of being right about something. And then I learned I was wrong.

This was when I started to distrust that feeling. It is comforting, but not a trustworthy guide to truth.