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?
Presumably we’ll see that happen here as well, just potentially at a higher level, with instances rather than just communities.
I recently had to migrate my Mastodon account (home.social shut down, for… frankly frustrating reasons, but whatever). It was a pretty painful process, and none of my old toots exist as a result.
Hopefully we can figure this out with Lemmy, and in doing so, make migration painless enough that it can even be a common occurrence without a loss of data and content. Let’s not forget that one of the great things about Reddit is (was, I guess) that old threads still contain relevant information from passionate enthusiasts.