Recently I have been thinking a lot about free software, forks, modding and remixing, and recently I found a game on itch that was very interesting, and I had an idea I wanted to test on the game. Luckily I knew the creator, messaged him and he was ok with me making a modification. What I thought afterwards was that if I made a mod for his game and post it on itch, I would definitely have a link of his game on my page somehow to say that it was a mod.
After that I saw this thread: https://itch.io/t/608043/big-question-and-i-cant-think-of-a-title#post-1047858
And it all got me thinking, modding is a great way of getting people that don't have time/knowledge/resources to implement a whole game, and it is a very hard thing to properly support in your game (say something like a steam workshop). I really feel that incentivizing people to want to have their game modded and people to mod other games might be in line with what I understand is a value of itch.io.
I want to open a discussion on how and what can be added to itch in order to incentivize modding. The basic idea I had is being able to have a checkbox on your game publishing page saying that you are ok with your game being modded, with some basic instructions on how to do so (eg.: fork this git repo). This could make your game page have some kind of button like "mod this game", which would then open the said instructions and could even create an unpublished itch page of the game mod, which you could then update with your own version, and that would have a link to the original author.
This all seems very utopic, but I really think is an interesting conversation to have =)