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 agree with focused instances over reddit clones. My favorite instances are specialized, and have their own focus, which leads to a more engaging discussion format. Hexbear.net, Lemmygrad.ml, Mander.xyz, dbzer0, slrpnk.net, pawb.social, etc. are all examples of this. The games community on, say, Hexbear.net is going to be different from Lenmy.world’s, and that’s a good thing. Federation allows others to participate in “flavored” versions of comms, and creates a sort of virtual township structure that’s pretty nice while still having an active enough userbase.
This is well said. Hadn’t thought of it this way. Makes for a much better experience overall.
Yep! Also why I enjoy browsing Grad and Hex more than Lemmy.ml, to be honest.
I think if you’re a milquetoast shit liberal whose politics are at home with /r/politics there’s literally no reason to be here but hey that’s just me i guess, maybe we do need 27 identical websites with the same dumb fuckers posting the same stupid shit
It’s only a problem when people spam the same links to all of these communities. As long as the content is somewhat unique I happily subscribe to multiple communities with the same name on multiple instances.
I think its interesting that multiple instances feel they need their own “music@my-instance” community. One might expect that the instance doesn’t really matter, and each instance is just a gateway to the larger federated collection of communities.
But that’s not really the case - individual instances do have their own flavor to some extent. Moderation policy can be different, instances can avow some kind of purpose, like hexbear.net for instance is explicitly “leftist”. Other servers have different priorities.
In that context, it makes more sense to have duplicate communities - for instance if you post a youtube link on on music@hexbear.net you get an annoying warning about youtube. That fits with their leftist perspective. And its likely you’d get a different response from posting leftist music there than posting it on some right wing instance.
