I think this will make sense for porn. Moderation of xxx subs has always been a challenge. With separate instances, if an instance is found to be hosting unacceptable material, the rest of the Lemmy network can simply blacklist that instance.

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.

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.

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.

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 main community 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.

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.

@aka_oscar@beehaw.org @lemmy@lemmy.ml Yes - https://mander.xyz is a good example of this (Nature Instance). A few generalist servers are ok as entry points but how does lemmy.one,lemmy.world,lemmy.click differentiate from one another and not just dilute or cannibalise content? Why should beehaw.org spin up a gardening community when https://mander.xyz/c/gardening exists? I would have thought funnelling users there would help spread the load on the network would have been a useful approach, because ultimately that is the advantage of federation.

That’s kinda why I joined the mander.xyz instance. It made the most sense to me since I like sciencey stuff.

Instances meaningfully differ by moderating values and funding sources. Cross instance federated communities provide subject-specific themes.

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.

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”.

I agree. I think it would be even more powerful if we could ‘merge’ communities and their posts, so c/technology gathers posts from multiple instances that are federated from a user’s server