Seems like an interesting effort. A developer is building an alternative Java-based backend to Lemmy’s Rust-based one, with the goal of building in a handful of different features. The dev is looking at using this compatibility to migrate their instance over to the new platform, while allowing the community to use their apps of choice.
Dessalines is currently working on mod actions for Jerbia. Someone recently made a PR for moderator edits but it seems there was not enough interest and it was closed by the author. Better reports handling would be nice, but if you read the issue its not really clear how this should work. Private communities are on the roadmap for this year.
Karma is intentionally left out of Lemmy because it has many negative effects. Wikis make more sense as a standalone project, in fact Im working on something. Flairs are also potentially on the roadmap. For hashtags I dont really see the benefit as they would serve a very similar purpose to communities.
With regards to hashtags I think the utility is mostly in searching among similar things within a community. Suppose there’s a community that serves a purpose like r/askhistorians, stackexchange, or like what I’m trying to do over at !opencourselectures@slrpnk.net. In each of those cases, it is enormously useful to be able to search the community by subtopic. Obviously, this could be solved in other ways, but hashtags are probably the simplest to understand and implement.
Very excited to see the outcome of your Ibis project, but I think Lemmy native wikis would see significantly more activity. The easiest implementation I can imagine is a slightly altered frontend for communities marked wikis that also handle some well known syntax (like [[link]] popularized by pkm systems) for internal links. That is links to posts by the same name within a community.
Currently, I’m working on a lemmy bot that handles exactly this internal linking, and hashtag functionality, then builds a static site with support for github pages (so the end result is both a linked community and a seperate site), but I’d much rather have this functionality built into lemmy. To be frank, I’d much rather be trying to build this functionality into lemmy and if I wasn’t nearly certain it’d get shot down as out-of-scope, I’d probably be doing that.
I know you’re not particularly fond of growth based arguments for new features, but I sincerely believe that the thing that made reddit great in those early days was the tendency for communities to compile resources (particularly for niche and hobby communities). This gave the communities a certain depth that is nearly impossible with posts alone. If that were a first-class feature of Lemmy, I think you’d very quickly see Lemmy fill the niche that federated wiki projects and supplementary wiki services have so far failed to.
Then hashtags would have the same use as post tags on Reddit. I think thats a cleaner solution and there are plans to implement it.
Lemmy is already a very complicated project, and adding more functionality will only make it harder to maintain. Also there are lots of people who use wikis without Reddit, Wikipedia is one of the biggest websites in the world after all. So a Fediverse alternative is very much needed. Plus Lemmy and Ibis can federate in the future.