Computer Science student here.

Forking Lemmy does fork its bad habits but doing so would at least give us the option of making direct improvements to the mod tools.

From what I’ve read, causing deleted content to get deleted quickly is a smaller change. Advertising that shortened deletion delay and giving the admins a “these keep our shit, yeet their federation privileges but check again every day and notify me when that changes” script wouldn’t be too hard to create.

We might even be better off ignoring the Lemmy codebase for mod tools altogether. If we outright ignore cross-platform compatibility, we can make a mod tools API independent of Lemmy-proper that does what’s needed and a JavaScript-controlled interface to sit on top or a separate toolset altogether.

I’m pretty busy right now but I rely on Beehaw for decent social media. I’d be willing to put a bit of time into it.

Probably? I didn’t check on whether angle brackets or square brackets are for optional parameters. It’s an arbitrary thing and my meaning is entirely decipherable in any order.

Terminal isn’t over complicated, it’s the most basic interaction with operating systems and was the first mainstream UI to ever exist because it’s a natural extension of what interacting with a computer truly is.

Terminal has very basic, particular syntax: Command [required parameters]

It has some useful additions as well, like

| to pass the output of the precious command to another command

> to write to a file

< to read from a file

This basic structure allows additional tools to be installed and run without having to learn a unique GUI with all the quirks of the GUI designer for each application. You just add new commands and move on with your life, maybe referencing the manual page to check which parameters you need.

Windows has a very particular GUI design that everyone knows because of the way Microsoft captured the market in the early days, before laws prevented them from doing so. Windows is esoteric, it has a variety of GUI philosophies all jumbled together. Explorer/control panel exists next to “Metro” apps, now “Windows apps” and they both do separate things without ever integrating the two properly.

Windows is arcane and understanding it fully is thousands of hours of practice, if you actually try new things. Linux is perfectly usable from command line with just a few dozens of hours of practice.

I say all this as a primarily Windows desktop user who uses Linux when it comes to actually getting things done. If we taught Linux to our children in schools and if businesses provided as much Linux training to workers as they do windows training, the discussion we’d be having would be about how windows is too complicated and just needs a UI similar to the ones available with Linux.