Just throwing out a thought for discussion:

Should Lemmy potentially add a profile status indicator that users can manually set—kind of like what platforms like Discord use?

For example, something where users can choose to display:

🟢 Online

🔴 Busy / Do Not Disturb

⚫ Invisible

⚪ Offline

–

Or even something custom, like:

“Away”

“Lurking”

“Work”

“[Enter Custom Text Here]”

etc.

It wouldn’t have to be real-time tracking, just a manual toggle in profile settings or next to your username.

Could be useful for signaling whether you’re active, taking a break, or just want to lurk quietly without being pinged or messaged.

Would this be helpful, or does it go against Lemmy’s minimalist, federated design?

Curious what others think.

  • Lazycog@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    15 hours ago

    While I personally wouldn’t want this and agree with the comments about simplicity, old forum style, privacy talking points, I just don’t understand why people downvote this post.

    It’s a good question that creates good discussion (you know, purpose of lemmy) and doesn’t really lead to anything concrete necessarily. Just interesting discussion.

    People use downvote as a disagree button but it does have a real impact on the feed: this post will get buried by some post feed filters and some people will never see the good discussion going on in here.

    But to answer the question (even though there are already good answers): I personally think it’s also a stressful feature that will just make people feel like they need to answer to replies / will make lemmy look dead because only a handful of people use anything but “invisible” status.

  • WastedJobe@feddit.org
    8·
    3 days ago

    I don’t think this is needed, Lemmy is about the content, not about individual users. Adding more user focused functionality is what made reddit feel worse today than it did 10 years ago.

  • razorcandy@discuss.tchncs.de
    8·
    3 days ago

    I like how Lemmy is reminiscent of early Internet forums and how users have a choice to share as little or as much as they want about themselves. Having online status publicly displayed detracts from that experience. We shouldn’t have to justify being offline or simply not wanting to respond right away. The internet is at our fingertips but it doesn’t mean we need to be accessible all the time.