I started up my own instance and now I have realized that there’s no reason anyone would join mine instead of any other instance.

That’s no good. What neat stuff would the Fediverse like to see in a Lemmy instance?

  • Follow RSS feeds in your Lemmy feed? I have that already, in a way, but it would be nice to be able to do it for any feed automatically without it being clunky.
  • Follow Mastodon users? Or tags?
  • Embedded video? That seems costly.
  • Hackability? The ability to run your own customized front end? Or good scripting features in the browser console?
  • A better looking UI? This one is functional but it’s not pretty.
  • Better moderation? I have heard the Lemmy tools aren’t that good.
  • Something else?
  • @baatliwalaEnglish
    2•1 month ago

    Honestly at this point there’s a fairly large number of instances so yours would need a selling point to even begin. And that’s before taking things like owner behaviour and strictness into consideration because the instance theme and tools will always be the first impression.

    “Generic catch all instances” are common. You can only build up a user base if existing people are willing to ditch their own. What are yours doing that the current ones do not?

    • Do you have a focus on a particular topic? I would consider posting a beautiful photo that I took on an instance dedicated to photography rather than the catch all one.
    • Is your UI unique/pretty? Which leads me to the next point…
    • Do you offer certain tools available/unique to your instance? 1) If yes, why can’t they be integrated with base lemmy? It’s open source after all. 2) If no for whatever reason (Lemmy devs slow to respond, low on their priority, will not accept, I don’t agree with their behaviour etc) is there a reason it cannot be included on other existing instances? Why is it exclusive to yours?

    And then I would start looking at the details like what would uptime be, how much are you yourself making an effort to contribute and expand, etc