rglullis

"rendezvous instances" is a perfect term for them...

1. I am not planning to close any instances. I am not working on them based on their current activity, but I am keeping them for a scenario where a mass migration away from Reddit actually happens.

2. When I say admins only, that can be extended to moderators as well.

At least I don’t think we should discourage creating different places for the same topics

I'm not discouraging it. To repeat: the idea is not to push a "there can be only one" mentality, but to set up a system that can work well for the 80% of people who can be satisfied with the median case.

I don't mean universal in the sense of "totalitarian", I mean it in the sense of "large common denominator".

Do you think that the conversation around, e.g, python programming or wood turning techniques will vary so much that it warrants many specific flavors?

it’s likely to be skewed towards whatever culture exists in western english-speaking countries

This is good enough for most people and does not hinder the ability of those that are in the minority to create a different/specialized community.

Centralization/decentralization is a spectrum. No one is proposing to force everyone into a single box. The idea is only to combine efforts for the things that exist in common and to avoid unnecessary redundancies.

I am not sure what "instance members" you are referring to, here.

The topic-based instances are closed for registration, so there are no users there.

If you are referring to the communick.news instance: it is only configured to have admins creating communities on it and the general instructions are to use https://fediverser.network as the place to discover communities.

I understand your concerns with moderation, but I don't see how what I am proposing would make things more difficult?

What would stop a troll to create different accounts on all the other different instances, or create another account whenever they get banned?

You are running an instance that is geared to serve people of an specific region. And I agree that they kind stay between the two extremes of the "group-focused" and "people-focused" instances.

The idea of topic-based instances are for the cases where the culture is more-or-less universal, but it doesn't mean that they should be absolute. So, if you want to talk about Apple stuff in general, !apple@hardware.watch would make more sense, but if you are trying to reach a group of Apple users in your area, then you can have a community on your local instance as well.

Yeah, I realized the issue with "main" as the name after the second time I wanted to post something and realized that the domain name is not used in the search field. I'll suck it up and just create a new community.

If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate?

Yes, I haven't had any issue moderating things from communick.news, even on communities that are not here.

But nowadays with Lemmy Explorer and with multiple community promo communities I think it’s not really hard to find the topics you are interested in.

This approach does not address two issues that would be resolved by separating "community instances" from "people instances":

1. Centralization of communities around the big instances, creating a "too big to fail" scenario. Last I checked, more than half of the top 100 communities are on LW.
2. Political/Ideological differences among larger instances causing needless fragmentation of the communities. E.g, there were discussions before about moving communities from .ml because some people didn't want to be associated with the Lemmy devs. Some were in favor, some were against. By having the communities on neutral ground, not only this whole issue is sidestepped, it also makes it easier for both sides of the table to be able to join one single community and make the overall fediverse stronger.

I was thinking more about the frequent cases of Mastodon instances shutting down because the admins got either tired of dealing with moderation or unable to afford the increasing operational costs. Seems like every week we get at least one instance announcing they will close up.

I didn't say that reddit's metrics were any better so your gotcha makes no sense.

These are all different questions than "why do you think it these are issues to overcome?". Perhaps it was not your intention, but your original question came off as challenging OP's complaint.

What measure of difficulty of content discovery are you using to determine that it is difficult?

Get 1000 random people, ask them to list 3 to 5 of their interests and to find them on "Lemmy". See how many successfully complete the task in less than 5 minutes. Do the same on Reddit.

What would not difficult content discovery be?

• A better onboarding wizard.
• An unified search engine that index all of the content, not just what is available in an given instance
• Recommendation algorithms (no, not all algorithms are bad)
• Searching people by their interests