I’m excited to see the new meme browsing interface feature in PieFed. I expected PieFed to be yet another Reddit clone using a different software stack and without any innovation. I believe there’s an opportunity to take things a step further by blending the best elements of platforms like Reddit and image boards like Safebooru.
I wish there was a platform that was a mix between Reddit and image boards like Safebooru. The problem I have with Reddit is the time-consuming process of posting content; I should be able to post something in a few seconds, but often finding the right community takes longer than actually posting, and you have to decide whether to post in every relevant community or just the one that fits best. In the case of Lemmy, the existence of multiple similar communities across different instances makes this issue even worse.
I like how image boards like Safebooru offer a streamlined posting experience, allowing users to share content within seconds. The real strength of these platforms lies in their curation and filtering capabilities. Users can post and curate content, and others can contribute to the curation process by adding or modifying tags. Leaderboards showcasing top taggers, posters, and commenters promote active participation and foster a sense of community. Thanks to the comprehensive tagging system, finding previously viewed content becomes a breeze, unlike the challenges often faced on Reddit and Lemmy. Users can easily filter out unwanted content by hiding specific tags, something that would require blocking entire communities on platforms like Lemmy.
However, image boards also have their limitations. What I don’t like about image boards is that they are primarily suited for image-based content and often lack robust text discussion capabilities or threaded comments, which are essential for fostering meaningful conversations.
Ideally, I envision a platform that combines the best of both worlds: the streamlined posting experience of image boards with the robust text discussion capabilities of platforms like Reddit and Lemmy.
I would be thrilled to contribute to a platform that considered some of the following features:
- Slashdot-Style Nuanced Voting System
- Rethinking Moderation: A Call for Trust Level Systems in the Fediverse
- My Dream Social Media Platform
- Lemmy backend issues
- Lemmy frontend issues
I would also like to see more community-driven development, asking users for feedback periodically in a post, and publicly stating what features devs will be working on. Code repositories issue trackers have some limitations. A threaded tree-like comment system is better for discussions, and having upvotes/downvotes helps surface the best ideas. I propose using a lemmy community as the issue tracker instead.
I’m intrigued by a tag based rather than subcommunity based system. I have a personal wiki system I use that is tag based, and its great since most notes fit in multiple categories. Different from a social board though.
Re images. A giant image, or an animated gif in the middle of a text discussion can be disruptive. The same with things like fancy user sigs that are 10x the size of the comment they posted. Do you have thoughts on how to limit this kind of distraction?
Discourage the disruptuve behavior, encourage the creative behavior. Personally, I usually like seeing (and sometimes using) pictures or gifs in comments. I like the added expression that it can covey. I know that not everyone feels the same way about it though. Maybe there could be an option to turn on/off this feature from an individual basis?
I would certainly like an ‘integrated’ multi-post system that would allow content to be posted to up-to 4 other communities, and it would wrangle all posts into the same comment section.
Slashdot-style voting is another one. Or even bland-voting, with some sort of tagging system (the same overrated, flamebait, informative, funny, etc) – The bland-vote allows no-thought up/down votes for spam control, etc – while the tag system lets you sort things you want to see like insightful for philosophical debate, informative for just factual information.
Honestly I’d love to see more tag systems just in general anyhow - they’re great for searches, they’re great for categorization.
How does Slashdot style voting work? It’s been too long since I’ve been there.
Moderation points are given out randomly, you’re not allowed to vote in posts that you’ve participated in, and you have a category you have to choose from to determine if it’s an up/down vote – Troll/Flamebait/Overrated for downvote, Informative/Insightful/Interesting/Underrated for upvote.
Downvotes also won’t allow you to get below some threshold, so that you can’t be ABSOLUTELY buried; it stops at like -1 or something, so that if viewpoint changes later on, it can get un-buried somewhat easily. You can only vote people from -1 to +5. Anything beyond that doesn’t really count. They have a slider at the top of the post to filter for +2’s and higher if you want, and hide anything under that; or you can choose to show everything, including the -1’s
My immediate concern with tags is descending into what Twitter has become: hashtags have been meaningless for a long while since there’s too much wrongly tagged stuff, different communities often use the same tag for different things, or there are ten tags all for the same thing. All of which means we’d need some form of moderator role that handles tags, and while I think it’s doable, it might take some trial and error to figure out how exactly we divide tags between moderators, how tags are proposed/created, and how tags are grouped/combined (e.g. food, foods).
On a lot of the image boards described by OP, tagging is managed by the users collectively. That is, almost everyone could not only add but also remove tags from content, as well as collectively maintain wiki on what the individual tags mean. When multiple similar tags meaning same thing come up, they’d alias to one central one; when different usages of same tag come up, they’d take a Wikipedia-esque approach to differentiate them; some even go as far as creating categories for tags so similar concepts can be grouped together. Trouble makers (people who repeatedly use tags incorrectly) lose their tagging privileges and so problem is kind of managed at bay.
The real strength of these platforms lies in their curation and filtering capabilities. Users can post and curate content, and others can contribute to the curation process by adding or modifying tags. Leaderboards showcasing top taggers, posters, and commenters promote active participation and foster a sense of community. Thanks to the comprehensive tagging system, finding previously viewed content becomes a breeze, unlike the challenges often faced on Reddit and Lemmy. Users can easily filter out unwanted content by hiding specific tags, something that would require blocking entire communities on platforms like Lemmy.
I agree, plus tags add context and allow for disambiguation of common terms. I’ve discussed this a couple of times, most recently I summarised my thoughts here. That goes a bit further - FediTags would be a federated tagging system that plugs into other services. That would then improve everyone’s ability to find discussion on different services (Lemmy and Mastodon don’t currently play well with each other) and to discover older discussion on a topic which can rapidly get lost in the “churn” when the default focus is usually on sorting by newest first.
Things like leaderboards would definitely be an idea as long as it didn’t lead to people gaming the system and, potentially, degrading it in the process. Also with federation, it might only really be possible to do local leaderboards, which would likely help address that concern somewhat.
