Hey there! I was wondering of how you might easily share your instance with others? I’ve created one mainly for nordic people, but I am struggling to “advertise” it to people. Have any tips for a noob at lemmy instances? Thanks in advance! Oh, and if you are by chance interested in joining, then just go to my account, it’s hosted there.
You got me. I think that the approach of having to subscribe to a community on every federated instance means that discovery is kind-of broken. I get that it is ‘working as intended’ but I think that may have had unintended consequences.
The result has been monolithic communities which are all the ‘same’, and it ends up splitting interests across communities, which will inevitably slow growth, and prevent lemmy from being a true reddit killer (this is basic math of networks and how they function).
I know the developers are doing their best, but I think at a high level lemmy needs to be reconsidered. Instances should be focusing on some niche thing, like poland ball humor, or skiing, or woodworking, each with niche communities within them. For example “wintersports” might have communtieis for skiing, cross country skiing, maybe one for showing off your new skiis, etc… That way your ‘home’ is around your central interest. Then allow ‘all federation’ across all instances (if you want to).
This wouldn’t be so much a software change as a cultural change to how we approach making lemmy’s (aside from the discovery issue).
I really agree with you here.
The reddit exodus happened so fast that people didn’t think through or have time to learn how to scale in the fediverse.
Subreddits should equal instances.
Common threads/stickies within subreddits should equal communities within instances.
Subreddits should not equal communities.
I 100% agree here. Each instance should focus on a single topic. It makes no practical sense that there are multiple identical communities across different servers.
It doesn’t make sense to have identical communities across different servers, but does it make sense to let an instance administrator to “own” a community? We’d be running into the same issue as we did with reddit.
I think the communities themselves should be federated, but I don’t know how we’d enforce any kind of rules then.