It feels like many Lemmy instances end up trying to be “Reddit replacements,” which results in dozens of very similar communities with overlapping topics. I wonder if it would make more sense for each instance to focus on a broad topic, like sports, literature, or technology, and then have communities for the subtopics within that.
What are your thoughts? Do you prefer many general instances, or would you rather see topic-focused instances?
I think chaotic instances without a clear focus are superior in terms of a stable fediverse. If you have a ‘main’ instance for programming stuff, queer topics, German content etc. you’re always at risk that the instance goes down and all content and communities die along.
Instances going down is a realistic scenario. Hacking / DDOS attacks, government takedown requests, copyright issues, hosting issues, admins losing interest… The more distributed certain topics are across instances, the more resilent they are against all these vectors.
I think it’s a good thing, because it discourages centralisation. If we end up with a bunch of specialist instances, then diversity suffers, because everyone looking for a specific area will end up on the one single specialist instance dedicated to it.
And I say that as the admin of an instance focused on the trans and gender diverse folk. There is a reason that we don’t enforce specialisation on those topics in our instance communities though. Even so, we still tend to be “the trans instance”, when I’d much prefer it if we were just one of many, like we are on the microblog part of the fediverse.
