My Perfect Social Media Platform: A Mix of Lemmy and Image Board with Customizable Feed Algorithms

• Multimedia support: The platform would support various media types, including text, pictures, GIFs, videos, audio files, and more. It would have a view similar to Lemmy and a grid-view for visual content, like an image board.

• Tagging System: The platform would implement a tagging system so users can categorize posts with relevant keywords. This helps others find content on specific topics and organizes content for better discoverability.

• Custom feeds: Allow users to create custom feeds that combine posts from multiple users, keywords, hashtags, communities, or instances. This is similar to Reddit’s multireddit, Kbin magazines and Firefish antennas. Firefish antennas allow users to specify keywords to include/exclude in categorized feeds.

• Upvoting and downvoting system: Users can upvote and downvote posts and comments to rank content, like on Lemmy. This usually surfaces entertaining content.

• Reactions: In addition to upvotes/downvotes, allow a wider range of reactions to posts and comments. For example, Facebook reactions like Like, Love, Haha, Sad, Angry.

• Threaded comments: Posts would have a threaded tree-like comment system for easy discussion.

• Private messaging: Users would be able to send private messages to each other.

• Notifications: Users would receive real-time notifications for new posts, comments, and messages. This increases user engagement.

• Dark mode: Offer a dark mode theme for usability.

• Localization: Support multiple languages to expand reach.

• User profiles: Detailed user profiles allow users to showcase their contributions, interests, and customize their presence on the platform. Users would have granular control over their profile privacy, being able to share with nobody, only followed users, or make fully public. Profile sections like bio, posts, collections, reputation, and other details could be toggled private or public individually.

• User reputation or karma: A user reputation or karma system based on contributions and interactions used to incentivize curation over just posting^[1].

• Achievements: Implement a gamified achievement system based on usage.

• Blocking: Users can block other users, tags and communities they don’t want to see.

• Content filtering: Users can filter their feed based on content type, such as text, images, videos, or links, allowing them to focus on the content they prefer. Also exclude content based on regex.

• Federated: The platform would be federated using the ActivityPub protocol, allowing for interoperability with other platforms in the Fediverse.

• Advanced search and tag filtering: The platform would offer advanced search and tag filtering options to improve content discovery^[2].

• Collections: Users could create collections with private/public visibility that could be edited by the creator only or anybody. Four types of collections in total.

• Downloading: Users can easily download media, collections, or tags.

• Spaces: Provide spaces where small groups of users can communicate in a more private setting. Spaces could have moderators and membership criteria.

• User trust levels and community moderation: The platform would implement user trust levels, like Discourse, on a per community and per instance basis, to avoid admin/mod burnout and reliance on bots for moderation. Moderators could be chosen based on activity in the community over the last x months and affinity with the admins.^[3]

• User curation: Users above a reputation threshold could tag posts for better organization, like on image boards. This improves curation compared to Lemmy which relies on titles^[4].

• Multi-criteria rating: Star ratings for various criteria to rank content based on a comprehensive evaluation. Multi-criteria ratings allow ranking content based on other factors, like quality instead of entertainment value. Could be a dropdown menu on every post/comment^[5].

• Custom algorithms: Users would be able to customize their feed algorithms, similar to Bluesky’s custom feeds^[6].

• Machine learning algorithms: The platform would use machine learning algorithms to personalize feeds and suggest posts based on user activity.

• User affinity: A user affinity system connects users with similar interests.

• Affinity recommendations: Recommendations based on high affinity users’ activity.

• One-size-fits-all image format: The platform would adopt a simple, one-size-fits-all image format for easy sharing without formatting issues.

• Affinity search: Search results biased by user’s affinity network improves relevance.

• Anonymous posting: Instances could enable the option of pseudonymous posting. Users could choose to be pseudonymous on a community basis, hiding their identity.

• Ephemeral content: Users, communities and instances could enable automatic pruning of old posts after a set amount of time.

• Polls and surveys: Allow users to create polls and surveys to gauge opinions and feedback.

• Wikis: Communities can create wikis to document information.

• Discourse markdown: Allow users to selectively quote parts of posts/comments when replying, which link to the original source, like in Discourse. Expand this feature to describe other interesting things that Discourse implements over CommonMark markdown.