this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Spread out communities makes it easier to avoid a single admin deciding to go crazy. Like imagine if Reddit had been composed of different instances, so people were able to just pack up and leave the instance he was on and not lose all their communities by quitting the Spez reddit instance. So you make a good point. Maybe over time there will be topic based instances popping up like an instance for entertainment, and an instance for games. Which would be pretty cool over a swiss army knife do everything approach instance where everyone starts migrating communities too because it has the largest user base.
This already is a thing, see StarTrek.website, Lemmy.film and LemmyNSFW.com for just a few examples.
The admin paranoia is tough because it goes both ways. Yes, big instances mean huge losses if they get abandoned, defederated or the admin loses his mind. At the same time, smaller instances are often run by regular people who can't or aren't interested in running an instance long term, or don't have the ability to have 99%+ uptime.
At the moment momentum is important to reach critical mass of users and it's just not feasible to tell most Reddit refugees "Okay so go to look up the handful of instances closest to your geographical location. Research their uptime, the reliability of their admins, their funding, their rules and whether they're defederated from any major instances. Just pick the one that best suits your needs! Oh, also remember to use [email protected] (don't forget the exclamation point!) when searching for communities because many small instances haven't connected yet to everyone. This also means these subs will appear empty at first because old content doesn't get propagated but don't worry about it. Oh and also sorting topics by Hot is bugged on small instances currently."
We're kind of starting to get that, we just need to encourage people to spread out from lemmy.world and make communities in these other instances. We've got lemmy.film that's TV and film focused, pathfinder.social and another ttrpg instance, star trek has an instance, the solar punk instance, there's a couple tech, privacy, and hacker instances. I'd also like to see more local area communities in instances like midwest.social instead of all on lemmy.world, too.