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?
Hopping between instances would have to be simplified significantly.
I don’t understand what you mean. Isn’t the point of federation that one account on one instance is as good as an account on every instance? I’ve never felt the need to hop between instances.
OP’s post is about having specialized instances, making hopping around necessary. It’s not convenient enough as it is.
Making specialized instances does not in any way make hopping around necessary. If you join a specialized instance that doesn’t already sub to the communities you want, you just add them.
Example: I join a Star Trek themed instance that has a bunch of locally created star trek communities. I want to sub to all those, but i ALSO want to sub to the homelab community on beehaw. I just subscribe to !homelab@beehaw.org FROM the star trek instance I am a member of.
Conversely, if someone has an account on beehaw.org and they want to read a star trek community based on that star trek instance, they just need to sub to it FROM beehaw.org.
By hopping around, do you mean changing your account to one on another instance, or viewing a list of communities on an instance, or something else?
I don’t feel that changing accounts is necessary because of the magic of federation. But I don’t know how to view a list of communities in an instance without leaving your home instance. That would be a cool feature, but is only really important when you’re initially picking all your subscriptions.