Welcome

Hello everyone,

I can tell there is a lot of interest in a tool to enhance the mod abilities of Lemmy.

I’ve been researching ways to do it. I have six options that I’m considering.

I’m trying to keep the topics high-level and avoid implementation discussions.

These are undeveloped high-level thoughts. I still have a lot of research into the Lemmy code base and ActivityPub.

It’s late for me, so these notes are from a stream of thought. There may be changes as I think more about this or get community feedback.

Option 1 - SaaS

Summary

A service I host. Probably maintained by donations. I might have an additional tier for enhanced moderation tools.

Pros:

  • Simple setup/registration.
  • No additional hosting cost for Lemmy admins.
  • Ability to use community-shared moderation.
  • Community data analysis to find bad actors across the federation.
  • Quicker to develop. No need to worry about tech support, setup, configuration wizards, etc.
  • Could be set up with any ActivityPub instance. (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.).
  • If successful, it could be my full-time gig.
  • I would be more engaged

Cons:

  • I have to store personally identifiable information & manage other compliance regulations.
  • Feature releases are limited to a single pipeline.
  • You don’t get your data.
  • No direct DB access to do advanced queries and changes.
  • Limited by ActivityPub capabilities.

Option 2 - Self-hosted

Summary

Admins would have to install, set up, and maintain the software.

Pros:

  • No cost for me to run anything.
  • Admins store their data.
  • Direct access to databases to do advanced querying.
  • Open source community project requiring/allowing outside development

Cons:

  • Additional network traffic if shared moderation is used.
  • Link flooding and spam tracking across instances aren’t as likely to exist.
  • Would mostly be purpose-built for Lemmy. No additional federation support.
  • I would be less engaged and rely on community support

Option 3 - SaaS that requires a self-hosted service

Summary

This is sort of a mix of the above. The interface and interaction are central; however, an agent must be installed to interface with the Lemmy instance.

Pros:

  • Best of both worlds.
  • A custom API could be built to work with the adapter service. Not limited by ActivityPub.

Cons:

  • Worst of both worlds.
  • Purpose-built for Lemmy to start. (Adapters for other systems could be built).
  • More complex to build.
  • Additional server cost and maintenance. More complicated setup for admins.

Option 4 - SaaS & Self-Hosted

Summary

You could use the SaaS solution or install it locally.

Pros:

  • I could charge for SaaS to finance the project.
  • All the pros of SaaS and Self-hosted
  • The people have choice

Cons:

  • More complex to build
  • All the cons of SaaS and Self-hosted

Option 5 - Ask the devs to do it

Summary

We tell the devs of Lemmy to include better tools and how we want them.

Pros:

  • Less work for me/us
  • Moderation built into Lemmy and not a separate app

Cons:

  • We have to wait for them to do it all
  • They might say no

Option 6 - Contribute to the dev repo

Summary

Build enhancements to the core of Lemmy’s moderation tools.

Pros:

  • Community support to add features
  • Users only have to update to get new features, no configuration
  • No additional server costs

Cons:

  • Only works on Lemmy
  • Lemmy becomes a Monolithic application - scaling challenges
    • Pro: A flag could be added to only enable moderation-specific scheduled tasks on a single instance.