Fediverse

This is by far my favorite set of suggestions. This is the kind of hackability fun instance that I would love to be a part of.

Proof of Humanity. There is some work about using Zero Knowledge Proofs as a way to be able to indicate that the owner of a key can also prove ownership of another set of credentials without having to reveal these credentials to third parties. This would allow us to really get rid of bots and sockpuppets.

Can you explain more? How would this do anything to prevent sockpuppets? I don't think they are preventable. I think the closest thing that exists is Something Awful's forums, where you have to pay $10 to participate and your user can be banned at the drop of a hat if you get out of line, and you're out $10. So you can run as many sockpuppet accounts as you want, as long as you feel like investing in what it'll take to keep making new ones.

That approach works perfectly on SA and I think there's something to it, but the $10 would be so shocking to the Fediverse mindset that I think it would be impossible for anyone to be on board with it.

The ability for users to bring their own cryptographic keys and actor id. This way even if a server goes down people could port their whole account over to a different server.

You can't bring an actor ID to a new domain name, can you? I can imagine an outlandish solution with each user registering their own domain for their actor, or having one provided by a guaranteed-trustable service, and then the server supporting those "foreign" actors, but it's definitely not easy. The idea of porting your stuff to a new server is an excellent idea but I think it's difficult to do with ActivityPub.

Multi-protocol federation.

Absolutely.

Pixelfed has support for most of the Fediverse: Lemmy's communities, Mastodon's groups, and Mastodon's microblogging. I'm thinking about messing around with Pixelfed before going any further with the Lemmy plan. Pixelfed might or might not work, but it might be a pure superset of what Lemmy can do, after some minor UI changes.

Get rid of downvotes/upvotes and replace it with multi-dimensional scoring/ranking system.

User-defined sorting/ranking. I do not want to completely block people, but I do wish to have a system that could boost/de-emphasize posts by certain people on certain topics, and completely ignore them in others.

This is one of the biggest things, to me. I messed around with some code to analyze the network of votes and make global determinations about users, and it worked well. Having the scoring and selection of posts being something that just has some quick math thrown at it but mostly left alone is a big missed opportunity to me.

Having a powerful hackable framework to customize the feed you're seeing, or add multiple feeds you can switch between, would be fantastic.

Cooperative media storage and distribution that could leverage the storage from clients as well as servers, something based on bittorrent.

I messed around with this too. It's not simple and I didn't get very far, but this is a very good idea to me. It also helps with hackability, because once you have that backing store that's using some model other than HTTP requests to nginx on the central instance, it's easy to make it writable for client-side plugins. It's a very, very ambitious thing but I like it very, very much.

Custom widgets that can be attached to a post/community. For example, I’d like to have a play-by-play tracker for basketball/football games.

Yes, exactly. I think once of the very next things on my list are seeing how realistically this kind of widget can be added to the Lemmy UI in a way that's customizable by the user. I think it's pretty easy. But all of this is work and work is hard, of course.

RDF/Semantic Web descriptors. If people are talking about a TV show, or making a list of PC components that they want to review or anything that can be part of a knowledge graph should be linkable and browsable by a specialized browser.

Collaborative lists/articles/posts. With the item above, it would be trivial to create wikipedia-style posts where a community can build their “common knowledge” and would make it easier for newcomers to get general recommendations and/or a sense of the community values.

This, I didn't think very much about. If there's a hackable framework for client-side tools, though, someone who wants to do these things should find it pretty easy.

This is exactly the type of thing I want to do.

Get rid of downvotes/upvotes

This. I haven't found a way to disable up/downvotes, even just their visibility in the UI. I understand the value of users rating post and comments, however I think the visible metrics turn Reddit and Lemmy alike into competitions for karma points rather than discussion.