Fediverse

The RSS feeds thing feels like a good one.

Additionally, some feature where you can start a community but define it simply as a combination of RSS feeds … essentially a feed aggregator. But one that others can share and subscribe to.

I think a bot could handle most of that.

Hackable front end is interesting. You can already run multiple alternative front ends. Lemmy world offer 5 I think. Then, they just need to be scriptable if that’s what you want.

Restyling the default one seems to be common though

Honestly at this point there's a fairly large number of instances so yours would need a selling point to even begin. And that's before taking things like owner behaviour and strictness into consideration because the instance theme and tools will always be the first impression.

"Generic catch all instances" are common. You can only build up a user base if existing people are willing to ditch their own. What are yours doing that the current ones do not?

• Do you have a focus on a particular topic? I would consider posting a beautiful photo that I took on an instance dedicated to photography rather than the catch all one.
• Is your UI unique/pretty? Which leads me to the next point...
• Do you offer certain tools available/unique to your instance? 1) If yes, why can't they be integrated with base lemmy? It's open source after all. 2) If no for whatever reason (Lemmy devs slow to respond, low on their priority, will not accept, I don't agree with their behaviour etc) is there a reason it cannot be included on other existing instances? Why is it exclusive to yours?

And then I would start looking at the details like what would uptime be, how much are you yourself making an effort to contribute and expand, etc

• Proof of Humanity. There is some work about using Zero Knowledge Proofs as a way to be able to indicate that the owner of a key can also prove ownership of another set of credentials without having to reveal these credentials to third parties. This would allow us to really get rid of bots and sockpuppets.
• The ability for users to bring their own cryptographic keys and actor id. This way even if a server goes down people could port their whole account over to a different server.
• Multi-protocol federation.
• Get rid of downvotes/upvotes and replace it with multi-dimensional scoring/ranking system.
• User-defined sorting/ranking. I do not want to completely block people, but I do wish to have a system that could boost/de-emphasize posts by certain people on certain topics, and completely ignore them in others.
• Cooperative media storage and distribution that could leverage the storage from clients as well as servers, something based on bittorrent.
• Custom widgets that can be attached to a post/community. For example, I'd like to have a play-by-play tracker for basketball/football games.
• RDF/Semantic Web descriptors. If people are talking about a TV show, or making a list of PC components that they want to review or anything that can be part of a knowledge graph should be linkable and browsable by a specialized browser.
• Collaborative lists/articles/posts. With the item above, it would be trivial to create wikipedia-style posts where a community can build their "common knowledge" and would make it easier for newcomers to get general recommendations and/or a sense of the community values.

Having some sort of democratic non profit behind it like codeberg which seem to be doing really well (or like a cooperative bank), anyone can be a member as long as he pays fees that help projects for the instance (which could include paying bounties or freelancers for lemmy feature development). You would have a election where you vote for a board of directors or even just one "instance leader" or something like that and he or they decide what to fund or what mods to appoint or impeach. You could copy codeberg bylaws and it might actually work.

You could argue just letting basically average people elect management would lead to incompetent management (plato made the same arguments, your in good company), but this model has it advantages and seems to work well . The American Association for the Advancement of Science uses this model and created one of the most well regarded science journal in the world (science)

Management that has multiple conflicting ideology and walks of life but respect each other and has a professionalism and tolerance for people they disagree with and invite them to discuss instead of ruling with a iron fist like feudal fief lords.

If there's a person (or bot) that claims to be unbiased but spams every political post with a biased assertion of the OP's partiality/impartiality with a huge post that is low effort copy+paste/script-generated, the correct response is to ban that person (or bot).

This is nothing new to online communities, but this instance seems to be struggling with this.