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?

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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