I started up my own instance and now I have realized that there’s no reason anyone would join mine instead of any other instance.
That’s no good. What neat stuff would the Fediverse like to see in a Lemmy instance?
- Follow RSS feeds in your Lemmy feed? I have that already, in a way, but it would be nice to be able to do it for any feed automatically without it being clunky.
- Follow Mastodon users? Or tags?
- Embedded video? That seems costly.
- Hackability? The ability to run your own customized front end? Or good scripting features in the browser console?
- A better looking UI? This one is functional but it’s not pretty.
- Better moderation? I have heard the Lemmy tools aren’t that good.
- Something else?
It is not, partly because it is still rough and just written, and partly because I’m scared people will start blasting RSS spam everywhere and it will be my fault.
That is fair. Might be worthwhile talking to instance admins and core devs about how best to make use of it? Putting it behind some admin approval or administration might be the best way.
There was an instance a while back that was dedicated to something similar. Their system was to define the feeds themselves without any real user input, and it never really took off.
Maybe a dedicated instance that provides more user control but is also set up to control and limit things could go a long way? One basic control might be limiting usage to user accounts older than a certain threshold. lemm dot ee does this for image uploads (4 weeks minimum age).
That’s a good idea. And then, if it turns into a mess of botspam, it’s not my fault.