What I think could make Lemmy superior to Reddit is the ability to create themed-instances that are all linked together which feels like the entire point. I’ve noticed that a lot of instances are trying to be a catch-all Reddit replacement by imitating specific subs which is understandable given the circumstances but seems like it’s not taking advantage of the full power that Lemmy could have.
Imagine for a moment that instances were more focus-based. Instead of having communities that are all mostly unrelated we had entire instances that are focused on one specific area of expertise or interest. Imagine a LOTR instance that had many sub-communities (in this case “communities” would be the wrong way to look at it, it would be more like categories) that dealt with different subjects in the LOTR universe: books, movies, lore, gaming, art, etc all in the same instance.
Imagine the types of instances that could be created with more granular categories within to better guide conversations: Baseball, Cars, Comics, Movies, Tech etc.
A tech instance could have dedicated communities for news, programming, dev, IT, Microsoft, Apple, iOS, linux. Or you could make it even more granular by having a dedicated instance for each of those because there’s so many categories that could be applied to each.
What are your thoughts?
Would be nice if it was “divided” by user types too. Imagine a post about a new Marvel movie and you could view a shared comment thread but also filter to remove “marvel-fans”, or see only “cineasts”, without leaving the thread. Could lead to more bubbles, but could also make it really easy to see what other bubbles are thinking.
This would be a great feature, but if it ever gets implemented it would have to default to show all users. All the echo chambers we saw on “the old site” would probably be amplified here otherwise.
Would they give the ability to categorize or stereotype your own account? That could get messy ha
I suppose I was dreaming a little and imagining an open news-item id database (through manual or AI assisted tags) and any post and comment section about a news item (meaning different articles about the same subject) would become connected through that, so basically you could access different discussions about the same topic with a single click without leaving your original page. You wouldn’t have to categorize your comments when posting in the thread, you already do that by commenting from a specific community and having your comment be hosted there (basically imagine the same movie trailer posted on r/movies r/marvelstudios r/truefilm with different comment sections but you can switch between comment sections without leaving the page or view them all mixed together, or mixed by your preferences).
But yeah this idea probably comes with a million problems and to actually work (for more than just the same url/article) would require an open internet content databases more sophisticated than what even the big tech companies probably have internally right now.