One thing to consider here is that photon as an spa does not offer great support search engines. Which can help drive organic traffic to lemmy. While, some may see it as a net benefit, from your point of view it’s an great disadvantage.

What an interesting read! The food analogy instantly made sense to me, I am wondering if other people had the same experience?

What is the point of all this, you may wonder? Well, reading Postman provided a big eureka moment for me - an understanding of why I struggle so much to convince my friends to abandon commercial social media in favor of the Fediverse. Drum roll: the Fediverse may be missing a clear, cohesive narrative.

Technically the Fediverse has everything one would need to enjoy independent social media, away from the surveillance capitalism that powers Big Tech. What has been difficult is finding a story, a simple narrative anyone could follow that would explain WHY the Fediverse is the most empowering, most ethical technological solution out there for social media.

I have come to see the Fediverse as the equivalent of organic, plant based, home-cooked meals and by contrast I see TikTok, Instagram, X, Threads, Snap and other platforms by Big Tech as the equivalent of Big Food – brands like Coca Cola, McDonalds, Nestlé, that promote ultra-processed, highly addictive foods and beverages, contributing to an epidemic of obesity, type 2 diabetes and other diet-related diseases.

For context, I am the top donor at my instance, I recognize that there is a need for funds. BUT, I believe it’s important for the fediverse to be accessible to everyone regardless if they have the funds for that.

Dopamine received, initiating hyperfocus protocol!

As a rule of thumb, we’ve observed that a team of 5 trained moderators appears to provide ample coverage and redundancy for servers of about 1,000 active users

That’s a fascinating bit of information. I would expect 5 moderators to provide coverage for more users. I am wondering how they came up with that statistic (will update the comment if I find an answer).

Remember that offliine/IRL community management experience can be just as important as online experience

Interesting idea, wondering what’s the IRL presence of the fediverse…

If you’re building toward participatory or democratic governance, consider establishing a proposal and voting system (some teams we spoke with use Loomio, but multiple options exist) for major policy decisions.

That’s soooo important, I love when communities create polls to decide on policy changes.

Avoid promoting brand-new members unless you already have a pre-existing relationship with them

I have followed some discussion on multi-level hierarchies on the fediverse, wondering if there are any instance implementing that…

Consider charging for accounts or offering paid memberships.

Hell no!

We hope there will be more resources available in the future, particularly tooling around legal compliance. This is one of the big infrastructural gaps we point out in our main report

That’s a big issue, I would be interested in hosting an instance available to other people, but I don’t want to end up in jail and I lack the resources to make sure that won’t happen…

That was an interesting read, it seems there is an in-depth analysis of the report here.

Can someone ELI5 so I can get enough dopamine to go read the whole thing?

Not sure if you are being sarcastic or not but I found this review.

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/14/5/858

I had done some research about a year ago, but I don’t have the papers saved.

If you are worried about duplicates, aka a single bot spamming multiple votes, then that’s feasible to mitigate.

If you are worried about multiple bots spamming one vote each, that’s harder to mitigate and it comes down to how the instances handles bot accounts in general. IMO it’s best to ignore the bot problem and instead focus on designing a vote weighting system that favors similar instances.

For anyone interested, there are a few papers on cryptographically secure voting, where both voter anonymity and election integrity are preserved.

Most designs consider three separate entities, where if you accumulate the information between those entities you would be able to identify a voter and his vote, but each entity on itself does not hold enough information.

Follow people from other instances, if you find them interesting, chances are they will find you interesting and follow back.

Use tags, especially popular ones.

Here is a list of note-taking apps:

https://github.com/tehtbl/awesome-note-taking

By the way, I am building my own Journaling system, it’s still early stages and I am looking for ideas!

Got anything to share? source/screenshots/roadmap/feature-set/mock-ups

Interesting concept, it would be nice to provide instructions for instance admins.

Also, I would suggest adding tags, that way instance admins can select specific tags if they want to. It would help create a better local feed for new instances.

To be honest, setting such a goal is scary to me, I have been working on my self-confidence, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it a few years ago. I try to remind myself that I am an autistic with ADHD: if I had food, meds, a bed, a place to study, and the frequent affirmation of a similarly interested peer group I would be happily studying 12 hours a day.

Super Crunchers seems like a good place to start, it’s a book about how quantitiative analysis can be used for social sciences.

I am guessing you didn’t add enough “big corps bad”.

PS big corps bad

A plugin system that allows for custom scoring methods is a good idea, IMO.

This would allow instance admins to install whatever plugins fit their users’ needs. See how many instances are deploying multiple clients like default Lemmy, old Lemmy, alexandrite, and many more.

Arbitrary code execution is not safe, so it would probably require an admin permission to install plugins.

Some ideas for interesting scoring/sorting methods or feed generation in general:

1. personalized AI scoring, most of us agree it’s bad when a big corp controls AI, but maybe it’s better if the user could fine tune it
2. instance/community/other AI scoring, instead of super individualized scoring sometimes you may value the feedback of others including the communities you follow or your instance
3. the explore feed that was recently suggested (or any another mixer), i.e. a mix of home, local and all based on factors the user can configure
4. random
5. Top/Hot/Active/New but only counting interactions from people you “trust” (i.e. you follow the same communities, or have at least X% compatibility) (again big corps bad, self hosting good)

Some of these services are not cheap to host, but the fediverse allows for multiple solutions to coexist. Some servers will charge for premium features, some servers will not provide them, some people will self host over engineered solutions, and big corps will show/sell ads and track user data (never forget big corps bad).

I admire your enthusiasm, so I would like to chime in with my 2 cents. I see a solution to an undefined problem, thus we cannot evaluate if said problem is solved by the solution.

Were I to redesign Lemmy, I would start by defining the requirements of that software. Things to consider here would be:

1. What would be the total number of users?
2. What would be the total number of communities?
3. What would be the total number of instances?
4. What would be the spread of users across instances? Are there categories we can define? (For example, a large instance may have millions of users, but a small instance may have 1-1000)
5. The same about communities.
6. What would be the number of posts, comments, and upvotes/downvotes for each instance or community category?
7. What’s the average size of a post or comment?
8. Probably countless more, but you got to restrict yourself to the ones with the most impact.

Then, I would define operations like:

1. Creating a post, a comment, or upvoting/downvoting
2. Retrieving posts (ordered) for a community.
3. Retrieving comments (ordered) for a post.
4. Retrieving posts (ordered) for a specific feed (subscribed, local, all).
5. Reporting a user.
6. Banning a user.

Then, I would look deep into Lemmy’s architecture in order to understand the complexity of these operations (time, memory, and developer effort). My understanding is that Lemmy is using a database to store all data you subscribe to, including posts, comments, upvotes/downvotes and stats across time. With all the data in a database, most read operations become a SQL query. On the other hand, write operations are relayed using the ActivityPub protocol.

Here I would stop for a bit, and see how I can help Lemmy right now. What’s the most value I can offer with as little effort as possible, i.e. the lowest hanging fruit. For the time being, I believe that would be moderation, basic features are missing, and there are many moderation issues someone could help with ideation, testing or implementation. However, a deep dive in moderation domain logic may not be for everyone, nor does it have to be. There are plenty of performance issues to contribute to.

This experience would give you the context needed to design a better architecture for Lemmy.

Last but not least, I suggest starting small. Distributed systems are complex, even seasoned veterans have difficulty getting their heads around it. For example, counting becomes a problem with large enough data.

Well, there is drama, like in any human community, it’s just that this community has half a million computer nerds.

It’s a bunch of people that have been leading the technological revolution of the past decades, all experimenting with something called the Fediverse.

While everything is new and there are a lot of changes, some things are more common than others.

1. Privacy matters.
2. Freedom of speech matters.
3. The internet should be built by the people, and for the people, not big corps.

PS Not everyone here is a computer nerd, though that’s something to take pride in IMO, but most of us kinda area.