Asklemmy

I think it's a good thing, because it discourages centralisation. If we end up with a bunch of specialist instances, then diversity suffers, because everyone looking for a specific area will end up on the one single specialist instance dedicated to it.

And I say that as the admin of an instance focused on the trans and gender diverse folk. There is a reason that we don't enforce specialisation on those topics in our instance communities though. Even so, we still tend to be "the trans instance", when I'd much prefer it if we were just one of many, like we are on the microblog part of the fediverse.

I think its interesting that multiple instances feel they need their own "music@my-instance" community. One might expect that the instance doesn't really matter, and each instance is just a gateway to the larger federated collection of communities.

But that's not really the case - individual instances do have their own flavor to some extent. Moderation policy can be different, instances can avow some kind of purpose, like hexbear.net for instance is explicitly "leftist". Other servers have different priorities.

In that context, it makes more sense to have duplicate communities - for instance if you post a youtube link on on music@hexbear.net you get an annoying warning about youtube. That fits with their leftist perspective. And its likely you'd get a different response from posting leftist music there than posting it on some right wing instance.

I agree with focused instances over reddit clones. My favorite instances are specialized, and have their own focus, which leads to a more engaging discussion format. Hexbear.net, Lemmygrad.ml, Mander.xyz, dbzer0, slrpnk.net, pawb.social, etc. are all examples of this. The games community on, say, Hexbear.net is going to be different from Lenmy.world's, and that's a good thing. Federation allows others to participate in "flavored" versions of comms, and creates a sort of virtual township structure that's pretty nice while still having an active enough userbase.

I think chaotic instances without a clear focus are superior in terms of a stable fediverse. If you have a 'main' instance for programming stuff, queer topics, German content etc. you're always at risk that the instance goes down and all content and communities die along.

Instances going down is a realistic scenario. Hacking / DDOS attacks, government takedown requests, copyright issues, hosting issues, admins losing interest... The more distributed certain topics are across instances, the more resilent they are against all these vectors.

Maybe there should be a mechanism for merging communities across instances.

If two communities set out with the same goal in a community and one of them didn't get very popular, wouldn't it be nice if they could come to an agreement to merge the communities and share the hosting burden?

I don't think it's an instancing problem.

It's not like reddit doesn't have duplicate communities for some things. People set out to do the same thing. It happens, and that's fine.

Sometimes they find each other, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they combine their efforts, sometimes they compete.

Same as individual posts. The good rises and grows, the bad is forgotten and disappears.

I personally prefer Lemmy Instances to be more personalised based on whatever theme/topic than a "one size, fits all". For example I'm on Lemmy.blahaj.zone which while is more for trans femme & trans women, I'm on it has it's queer-friendly. There used to be Lemmy instance for Autistic people which I remember was nice but it was shamed it got closed down.

Seeing same community name but on different instances is little overwhelming and I tend to post or use one that seems more active. I'll understand if that community in question has a moderator that does not great decision (like going too heavy on banning users or not doing anything about the bad-actors on that community) but otherwise, it just feels crowded and I had to spend couple minute to decide if a post I will make there will get as much attention compare to the other one.

I think it’s because it deters some people from joining the instance. Yes, an instance with more focus like slrpnk doesn’t necessarily mean they only talk about climate, as you can interact with other federated instances anyway. But people who are new or aren’t very familiar with how federation works gravitate towards general purpose instances because they either don’t have a preference or they don’t want to be “locked in” to a focused instance (even if it’s not true), or that access to content will be limited (also not true). That’s why .world and .ee (rip) are/were popular.

Yeah I think generally it would make more sense for individual instances to focus on specific topics, like programming.dev on programming or feddit.org for Europe.

It still makes sense to have the same communities in different languages if you ask me. There may also be other instances where this might actually be good.

But yeah, I don't need ten different tech communities all serving the same purpose.