I checked some of the forums in the link (https://nodebb.fediverse.observer/list) you posted, but it’s hard to tell what most of those NodeBB instances are actually for: many lack descriptions and the forum names don’t say much. I would have to read a few posts in each forum to figure out what each one is for. I found a literature forum but it only has three posts, I don’t want to make an account just to shout into the void, so I’m trying to post to it from Lemmy.

I tried posting to a literature community I found via Lemmy but the post never showed up on the NodeBB instance. I used Lemmy’s search with the target community URL (https://community.darkscribes.com/category/2/general-discussion), it found the community, and I created a post from Lemmy (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/54997372). I can see the post on Lemmy but not on the target NodeBB instance. Any idea why that might be or how to get Lemmy posts to appear on federated NodeBB forums?

You don’t seem to get my point. For a platform to let me reliably filter a whole topic, the majority of posts need to be tagged with that topic first. Reddit/Facebook don’t do that, they have communities and loose categories, not consistent topic tags across all posts. Twitter only partially does it with hashtags, and hashtags are neither comprehensive nor applied consistently. I’m talking about platform-level, booru-style or collaborative tagging so blocking a tag actually removes the tagged content without me having to unsubscribe from dozens of communities or build giant keyword lists.

There must be some reason why private messaging on this platform is unencrypted. Maybe it’s required by law in some countries, or it’s too difficult to implement.

For me, it would mainly be a blend between Tumblr and booru-style image boards, allowing users to follow people and tags, with filtering by tags and collaborative tagging. A trust-based moderation system akin to Discourse. I’d also want the ability to block tags and a Reddit-style tree-like comment system for better discussions. A nuanced voting system similar to Slashdot’s could help finding quality discussions by differentiating between types of content and allowing sorting by these different types.

How is the fediverse software innovating? Lemmy feels just like Reddit and Mastodon seems like Twitter but it doesn’t have algorithms so in practice it feels more like a chat.