The fediverse offers an exciting alternative to centralized social media silos like Twitter and Facebook. As someone passionate about the fediverse, I think a lot about what features would make up my perfect social media platform. I’m curious what ideas other fediverse users have!
What features, functionality, and design would your dream social media platform have? Here are some of my top wishes:
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User curation and tagging - Allow users to tag and organize content instead of relying purely on titles. Improves discoverability.
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Advanced search - Support complex search queries with boolean operators, field filters, date ranges etc. Makes finding relevant content easy.
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Custom feeds - Users can create customized feeds to follow or hide specific users, communities, instances, keywords, etc
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Multi-criteria ratings - Beyond likes, allow rating content on multiple criteria to allow sorting by quality and not just entertainment value.
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Affinity system - Connect users with similar interests. Recommend content based on affinity.
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User trust levels - Grant privileges based on user reputation to lessen reliance on centralized moderation.
My Dream Social Media Platform
Those are just a few of my ideas. What features would your perfect, decentralized social network have? How could we improve on what the fediverse currently offers? Let’s dream big about the future of social media!
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I’m cool with basically Lemmy but more polished UI, hidden/obfuscated vote counts and better mod tools. User votes is an OK way to sort by quality but without heavy moderation will always favor low-effort over longform content because it can be consumed at a much higher pace.
Don’t much care for image or video posts, user profiles, karma etc. Would certainly never want any kind of visible ratings. Basically I’m pro anything that enables thoughtful, varied discussion and anti anything that encourages quick, easy content consumption.
I think upvoting and downvoting should be removed in its current form. There should be a way to report content that doesn’t contribute to conversations or is hateful and if you want to know how popular a post is go off of alternate engagement metrics like views/comment count.
I genuinely see no benefit to upvoting or downvoting if the above mechanisms are in place. Upvotes are something many folks get obsessed with and downvotes are too easy to spam, especially on a social network that consists of mostly anonymous users. This post is a good example - it’s adding to the conversation and trying to spur engagement with the community but at the time of me commenting it has -1 upvotes (via Voyager since it aggregates downvotes/upvotes). What is the point of these mechanisms - they should be left to Reddit and the fediverse should innovate in this area and make something better than what we already had.
I disagree. I believe the function of upvotes and downvotes is self-evident, and if you are unable to handle the emotional ramifications that come along with that, you are welcome to disable downvotes within your instance, like hexbear already does.
Voting is a core feature of reddit and Lemmy. If you remove that, you end up with an entirely different kind of social media site.
For the record, I upvoted you because you make a good point. Voting doesn’t have to be toxic if the userbase understands the etiquette.
Appreciate the comment. I agree voting in theory is a good idea but I think a majority of people use it as not intended and it’s creating a net negative experience for the social media that utilizes it. Too many people use downvoting to show dissatisfaction with an opinion instead of the intended this doesn’t add to the conversation. Dog piling is a major issue IMO, psychologically many see negative votes (or many downvotes) and are inclined to treat those comments or posts with more derogatory comments or oppose the commenter before even reading the full post or comment. That’s a very real general example of functionality that’s shutting down engagement and being contradictory to the intent of the social media system being used. For a specific example, browse all with the new filter on lemmy and look at how many posts get downvoted right out of the gate that are perfectly legitimate posts for the communities they’re posting in. The moving good content to the top of your feed intention of upvotes doesn’t really work well in the fediverse without algo based feeds and the top filter could easily switch to views and comments to get the desired results without all the downside of how it is now.
If this were a minor issue I wouldn’t be commenting and would support the standard just ignore votes spiel but it seems to be that most people cannot handle the current voting system so I still see no benefit to them in their current form. The fediverse is the perfect environment to iterate and innovate on a system that doesn’t work as intended.
(Just letting you two know that this is exactly the kind of mindset I was looking for on Lemmy. Unfortunately, people bring their Reddit habits with them here.)
You make very good points. The beautiful thing about the fediverse is it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, different servers can try different solutions and mix and match whatever seems to be working best.
I really like your vision! Some I knew, some are new.
User curation and tagging - Allow users to tag and organize content instead of relying purely on titles. Improves discoverability.
I would love tags on posts. Many people love memes. I rarely do, and most often am annoyed by the shallow content in otherwise interesting communities. I’d love to filter memes out, and change my mind on an hourly basis. Or follow the Android community, but hide all posts discussing the latest version, which my phone cannot run anyways.
It would be nice if we could connect posts which were not created as cross-posts. And unify comment sections, although that comes with challenges.
This would also go well with the next dream feature:
Advanced search - Support complex search queries with boolean operators, field filters, date ranges etc. Makes finding relevant content easy.
Yes, please! Obviously, support the previously mentioned tags.
Custom feeds - Users can create customized feeds to follow or hide specific users, communities, instances, keywords, etc
I guess this includes community grouping? So instead of subscribing to 20 slightly different or outright redundant game communities, I can subscribe to one game group. I don’t see anything stopping the problem to repeat at this next level (slightly differently curated game groups), but I think it would still be an improvement.
And I would add a step on top: Specify how much you want to follow something, expressed as a float between 0 and 1. Zero effectively means “this instance / community / user is blocked”. One means “You will always see all activities and updates from that source, no matter how much interesting stuff is going on elsewhere”. So I can effectively ignore a community, but rarely see a post which really explodes, or say for another community that I want to see everything with at least some engagement in my feed.
Creating custom feeds is great. This would allow me to filter out exhausting content when I’m rather out to relax, and challenge myself with controversial ideas when I feel strong enough, supporting self care. I would also love to always see new content from certain niche communities.
Finally, I think it could be fun to share these settings with others, also to prevent re-invention of the wheel. Think like shaders are shared in games like Minecraft, which also change the way you filter and see the available content.
I’m not sure how much concern and thought should be put into malicious forms of “follow specific users”.
Multi-criteria ratings - Beyond likes, allow rating content on multiple criteria to allow sorting by quality and not just entertainment value.
I kind of like this idea (TED uses a similar system, no?), but am suspicious how well it would work in practice. Say we have 3 ratings for entertainment, information, fact/opinion or whatnot, and a user genuinely hates the post. Normally, this user would leave a downvote. Now, the user can/has to score 0, 0, ‘opinion’, and probably will. The question is, will users actually use the system honestly? But maybe that does not matter so much, since extreme votes like this don’t change the relative scores. Yes, the rated profile will probably still tell me if it’s rather entertaining or informative, based on other votes which differentiated.
Affinity system - Connect users with similar interests. Recommend content based on affinity.
Content recommendation would be nice, and also help with community discovery. Maybe even kickstart niche communities! Though I guess, if the above ideas are realized, this one would follow naturally, as one custom feed which subscribes to tags.
User trust levels - Grant privileges based on user reputation to lessen reliance on centralized moderation.
Privileges like what?
My own dreams about a future Lemmy include:
- accounts can migrate to other instances, keeping subscriptions but also post history and still getting notifications for replies on older stuff
- the interface is intuitive to use even for non-tech people, which results in a wide variety of topics in the network
- posts and comments have an instance-agnostic URL scheme, so that I can join a conversation on another instance without searching
- well integrated into other fediverse applications (which ideally all use the same login, if you want)
- bots merely serve with selective functionality (things like TL;DR, unit conversion) and do not create the majority of posts
For custom feeds, adding a weighting system to control how much of each source is shown is a brilliant idea. Sharing filter settings makes a lot of sense too.
For user trust levels, privileges could include post deletion/editing, banning users, pinning content, etc. Starting privileges low and slowly expanding them as reputation grows allows for decentralized moderation. The idea is Discourse or StackExchange moderation instead of Reddit like moderation.
Wall-to-wall video chats. Tired of everyone hiding from repercussions behind anonymity.
Let’s talk like humans do.
All the individual details are nice-to-haves, but the main important criteria I’m looking for, is no one trying to make money off of it.
What is the problem of having someone offering a service (social media hosting) at a fair price? There is virtually no way that we can have an universally accessible social media if we don’t have people paying for it.
Paying for services is fine, profit is the problem. Covering costs is all I want. No need for any agenda or hidden user costs. Just providing a service that people actually want to use.
Why is profit a problem? How do you account for the cost of the labor of the developers, or the time spent by volunteers?
Just providing a service that people actually want to use.
Why isn’t that deserving of profit?
If we’re talking about my dream, that is my dream. A platform that isn’t trying to make money. It’s not wrong to want to make money, but a platform that is trying to make money isn’t my dream platform.
All of my favourite stuff is run by non-profits.
I think that my argument here is that “the platform” doesn’t exist. The fediverser (much like the internet) is not made of one single entity that defines its direction.
Maybe I missed some context to the question, but I didn’t know my ideal social media platform had to be something that already existed.
Your original answer was about “main important criteria I’m looking for” and everything else being “nice-to-haves”. You are taking OP’s description of desirable features that are completely attainable and turned into some pointless grandstanding against “profit”.
It’s the kind of thing that makes me lose all hope that we can ever win the fight against Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism. Instead of saying “I’m so willing to have social media that doesn’t suck that I’m willing to pay $ for it”, you are saying “I don’t really care, as long as it magically materializes in front of me at the expense of someone else”.
It’s a lame, lazy cop-out.
I don’t consider this platform, Reddit, or Twitter social media, because there isn’t any real socializing. You don’t talk to people, or meet people, you discuss a singular (usually shallow) topic and move on. I honestly think MySpace was the height of social media and it’s all been downhill since then.
Spiral notebook I keep in the bottom drawer of my office
Letterboxd but self-hosted and federated!
