From what i can gather, it could be beneficial to, for example, have an instance which would become the main place to get videogame content on Lemmy. Most communities would be for specific games or AAA companies, but it could also have c/general for asking questions or topics which are non specific to any community, or c/meta, which would work as a place to discuss the state of the instance.
Overall, nothing that different from the actual status quo, but this way, we could consider instances as hubs for certain topics, which would then specialize with the /c/s within said instance. Instead of having 7 c/technology across instances, we could have @Tech.no and subdivide it into c/topic1, c/topic2, etc. (was supposed to come up with smthing but came empty handed shut up i dont browse that sub) .
What im mostly seeing here is that popular instances themselves are not different from reddit. The most popular instances on lemmy are beehaw.org and lemmy.ml, which have the same m.o, if you will, of reddit. Which is good, theyre popular for a reason, but in a way, theyre competing with each other. Not financially, but there will be overlap between certain /c/s.
Of course im not asking if its possible. Its just a matter of running the server and having the right infrastructure. My question is if you think its feasible to decentralize lemmy from the main instances, or even a good idea in the first place. Maybe you think its ok the way things currently are? Or maybe what i said is supposed to be the goal and im just late to the party? What are your thoughts?
Reddit hugely benefits from centralization. It’s hard to vibrant communities for niche topics when these communities are even further split up through some means.
This is a challenge lemmy/kbin etc have to face that will make mass adoption even more difficult than for mastodon etc where the focal point are people and not groups anyways.I think making an effort to have topic specific instances and not generalistic instances that often duplicate topics is possibly one of the best way to mitigate this inbuilt advantage lemmy/kbin etc face.
Other hugely important things would be integration with groups from mastodon, pixelfed etc once those come along and the ability to merge and move entire communities imo.
Definitely think that content specific instances with more niche communities within them is the way forward. There’s no reason for lemmy.ml to have a raspberry pi community if computers.social has a raspberry pi community.
So you’d have one Raspberry Pi community rather than every server creating their own? That would seem easier for some new users coming onboard.
That’s kinda why I joined the mander.xyz instance. It made the most sense to me since I like sciencey stuff.
Themed instances definitely make sense, but I suppose this needs to happen quickly, before one of the larger, general purpose instances makes the communities the instance would cover. Discoverability is definitely better on a larger instance, especially since the default setting seems to be to only show local communities (we need a snappier term than “communities”!).
I’ve noticed a few instances set up designed for communities and not users, but it feels like that’s a difficult way to try to build a community. Something like mander.xyz seems like it’s got a better chance.
Edit to mention that it’d be useful if you could “forward” users to the right place if they end up in an out of date (or typoed?) community. E.g. how in reddit you see CSS/a pinned post saying “you’re looking for x here”.
In my personal view, in a developed “Lemmyverse” one instance would cover a topic about as specific as a general subreddit.
When making an instance I first thought about making a much more focused instance. To give you an example, one idea was to focus on reptiles and amphibians.The communities would then be much more specific - salamanders, pets, geckos, snakes, etc… And this structure can certainly work, as there are many forums like that! For example, this forum about microscopy has a healthy community. But several people with very specific interests would need to show up simultaneously to build an engaging community. So I decided to broaden the topic to cover science and nature in general - and at the moment it is fine because there are not that many users.
However, once Lemmy becomes more popular and hopefully scales up successfully, there will be many more people with specific interests looking at these sites. Then it should be possible to form reasonably engaged communities based around niche topics. At that point, an instance dedicated to “Science” would be way too broad!
It is great that many users are joining in by discovering the instances that already exist. Hopefully many will realize that the really interesting part is the ability of creating and self-hosting an instance in a server that you have control of. I think that the best way of scaling up would be by having lots of people hosting small instances.
That’s what I’m going for with some subs I have in mind.
After I learn how to maintain a lemmy instance I’ll check with some language and/or world building subs to have a dedicated instance, starting with conlangs and neography.That’s mostly what I’m trying to do. On Reddit there are dozens, probably hundreds of communities around pop music. When thinking about what I wanted my instance to be I decided on pop music specific thinking that it’s something I’m passionate about and probably big enough to warrant it’s own instance if Lemmy gets bigger.
As lemmy.ml is showing, it isn’t built to be a one stop shop for everything, we have to fracture it out a bit.
I was thinking about this last night. I think this would be great for something like Television, Movies, Books, etc.
You could have an instance like television.social (or whatever) and then create all the various communities from there. You could have a
maincommunity that serves as a place where general posts and discussion goes, and then create additional communities for individual shows.At the end of the day, there are no hard rules in place for this, so communal overlap will likely be something that we’ll have to deal with for the foreseeable future, but I do hope that we’ll see this convention adopted by more users as time goes on.
