There was a little bump in users, and the LemmyWorld admins posted this, but the included apps guide was out of date. I went to ask about it and saw the account that made the post is no longer active (moved instances). I then tried to update it myself and made progress, but got overwhelmed.
Two parts of my suggestion:
Part 1) Have a repository to pull from
Users don’t like to go off site, which is why a pinned post with the resources works well. However, pinned posts go out of date, and it’s a lot of ask for one person to manually edit it and keep it updated.
Instead, why not make a repository with a collection of markdown files containing the post body contents. Then there would be one source of truth that everyone can update.
The post contents would also include:
- Link to the contribution page, so it’s easy to suggest changes
- Last updated date, so that if a post goes out of date the users can ask it to be updated or just go to the source.
Whenever the post needs to be updated, the OP can paste in the newest contents.
Part 2) A nicer list of resources
I guess this is more of a ‘nice to have’ feature, but it would be nice if we had a site that was easier to navigate, ‘prettier’, and more accessible to casual users. We have this for our community/Subreddit, and it’s pretty easy to keep updated: https://ubcwiki.ca/index.html. It runs open source mdBook
Right now Lemmy has awesome-lemmy and [awesome-lemmy-instances](Owner avatar awesome-lemmy-instances). But they’re not the nicest to look at, and it’s a bit annoying to find content (especially awesome-lemmy) because of the format. There’s a lot of text on one page, and little variation in spacing/text size.
The new site could have the same contents, a lot could be copy and pasted over, and it could be updated from the same repo. Only difference is that it would be nicer to use.
The hope is that the repo would be open so anyone could clone it if the original project was being unethical. Similarly, users are free to modify the lists when posting, or maintaining their own forks so they can benefit from updates but keep their own structure.
We would need some rules about how the list should be ordered, and what content wouldn’t be allowed. For apps/extensions that’s simpler, you can order by installs and have a threshold (ex. Top 5 are listed prominently, rest are listed in a section below, ordered alphabetically). For instances/communities this is a little harder, and I don’t know what the best way to handle it would be.
For the second point, right now the alternatives are also single repos, so it wouldn’t change much past the structure.