Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about coding or how this stuff works in the background.
But I’m a fairly old reddit user excited with Lemmy who thinks that the the limitation to the creation of communities is a good thing and that there’s always a chance to make stuff differently.
The concept I would like to brainstorm is: branching.
Instead of simply giving the ability to create new communities to users, would it be possible (and desirable) to just branch existing communities? As an example, let’s imagine that DnD discussions start to dominate the gaming community (yeah, I know, it’s just for theoretical hypothesis). Could the mods at a certain point decide to create a sub community for DnD inside the gaming community? When people would subscribe to “gaming” they would see the existing branches and decide if they want to subscribe to gaming in general or just that one set of games in particular. Apart from the benefit to the user, a mapping of Lemmy’s communities would also be much more easy to visualize.
I don’t know… this just occurred to me and wanted to share.
I just want to say thanks for such an honest and comprehensive explanation. I don't think I have much to offer, but I feel very welcomed (is that a word?) here. The choices you made and the ethos you hold yourself and the instance against seem very well intentioned and a good way to circumvent some of the nastiest things social networks brought to this world. There are lots of places in the internet to get ethically subjective content, for those who want it. This doesn't need to be a place for it.
The "growing" part of the network project it's very subjective. Of course that a network needs a good amount of users to generate enough content and discussion, but at the same time, crowds usually don't add much to the niceness of any place.
Thanks once again for creating this.