In my personal view, in a developed “Lemmyverse” one instance would cover a topic about as specific as a general subreddit.

When making an instance I first thought about making a much more focused instance. To give you an example, one idea was to focus on reptiles and amphibians.The communities would then be much more specific - salamanders, pets, geckos, snakes, etc… And this structure can certainly work, as there are many forums like that! For example, this forum about microscopy has a healthy community. But several people with very specific interests would need to show up simultaneously to build an engaging community. So I decided to broaden the topic to cover science and nature in general - and at the moment it is fine because there are not that many users.

However, once Lemmy becomes more popular and hopefully scales up successfully, there will be many more people with specific interests looking at these sites. Then it should be possible to form reasonably engaged communities based around niche topics. At that point, an instance dedicated to “Science” would be way too broad!

It is great that many users are joining in by discovering the instances that already exist. Hopefully many will realize that the really interesting part is the ability of creating and self-hosting an instance in a server that you have control of. I think that the best way of scaling up would be by having lots of people hosting small instances.

That’s what I’m going for with some subs I have in mind.
After I learn how to maintain a lemmy instance I’ll check with some language and/or world building subs to have a dedicated instance, starting with conlangs and neography.

Themed instances definitely make sense, but I suppose this needs to happen quickly, before one of the larger, general purpose instances makes the communities the instance would cover. Discoverability is definitely better on a larger instance, especially since the default setting seems to be to only show local communities (we need a snappier term than “communities”!).

I’ve noticed a few instances set up designed for communities and not users, but it feels like that’s a difficult way to try to build a community. Something like mander.xyz seems like it’s got a better chance.

Edit to mention that it’d be useful if you could “forward” users to the right place if they end up in an out of date (or typoed?) community. E.g. how in reddit you see CSS/a pinned post saying “you’re looking for x here”.

That’s kinda why I joined the mander.xyz instance. It made the most sense to me since I like sciencey stuff.

I was thinking about this last night. I think this would be great for something like Television, Movies, Books, etc.

You could have an instance like television.social (or whatever) and then create all the various communities from there. You could have a main community that serves as a place where general posts and discussion goes, and then create additional communities for individual shows.

At the end of the day, there are no hard rules in place for this, so communal overlap will likely be something that we’ll have to deal with for the foreseeable future, but I do hope that we’ll see this convention adopted by more users as time goes on.

Definitely think that content specific instances with more niche communities within them is the way forward. There’s no reason for lemmy.ml to have a raspberry pi community if computers.social has a raspberry pi community.