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?

  • socialjusticewizard@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    1 year ago

    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/bladesinthedark in your favourite instance, but you could also make mybladesinthedark.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.org account, or something like that. Maybe mybladesinthedark.org is 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.