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?
There are some good reasons to do it. You can basically recreate the classic forum experience. Say you want to make an all purposes Blades in the Dark community. You could just make
/c/bladesinthedarkin your favourite instance, but you could also makemybladesinthedark.org/c/generaldiscussion,/c/characterart,/c/gamestories,/c/playbypost, even/c/offtopic, and restrict the creation of new communities to mods, or to admins with an@mybladesinthedark.orgaccount, or something like that. Maybemybladesinthedark.orgis owned by the company that publishes bitd, allowing them to create a series of “official” communities linked under the lemmy network but still locally managed.IMO this is a pretty powerful tool, and while I don’t think it should be the standard, it definitely does ad d cool value that competitors lack.
I get your point, but you could get the same effect with c/subject_subsubject. I guess it’s to the people to decide.
One point against creating a brand new instance i think is that u might miss a lot of good content from other subLems at other instances that exist before someone from your instance sub to that subLem. But it’s a pros and cons game like everything in life.
I’d imagine that this hypothetical forum-instance would be such that the only people with an @myforum.whatever login would be admins/mods of that specific forum, at least that’s how I’d run it. It’d be designed to be visited to, not visited from. The advantage is only that it creates a linked identity, so it’s easy for someone to find all the myforum.whatever topical areas by going to the front page, instead of trying to seek them out through sidebar links. From a “brand management” perspective, though, it gives the owner of that forum essentially full independent control of how they operate, and I think that’s really strong.