From what i can gather, it could be beneficial to, for example, have an instance which would become the main place to get videogame content on Lemmy. Most communities would be for specific games or AAA companies, but it could also have c/general for asking questions or topics which are non specific to any community, or c/meta, which would work as a place to discuss the state of the instance.
Overall, nothing that different from the actual status quo, but this way, we could consider instances as hubs for certain topics, which would then specialize with the /c/s within said instance. Instead of having 7 c/technology across instances, we could have @Tech.no and subdivide it into c/topic1, c/topic2, etc. (was supposed to come up with smthing but came empty handed shut up i dont browse that sub) .
What im mostly seeing here is that popular instances themselves are not different from reddit. The most popular instances on lemmy are beehaw.org and lemmy.ml, which have the same m.o, if you will, of reddit. Which is good, theyre popular for a reason, but in a way, theyre competing with each other. Not financially, but there will be overlap between certain /c/s.
Of course im not asking if its possible. Its just a matter of running the server and having the right infrastructure. My question is if you think its feasible to decentralize lemmy from the main instances, or even a good idea in the first place. Maybe you think its ok the way things currently are? Or maybe what i said is supposed to be the goal and im just late to the party? What are your thoughts?
I agree. I think it would be even more powerful if we could ‘merge’ communities and their posts, so c/technology gathers posts from multiple instances that are federated from a user’s server
I was thinking about this as well but it gets complicated. Different instances may have very different communities with the same name. Should /c/news just be merged from a small local instance with /c/news on lemmy.ml? Some identical names may even be for completely unrelated topics. It was amusing to browse the Rust subreddit (for the programming language) and see so many posts from people wanting to talk about the video game called Rust. Maybe individual users can crate their own aggregates of instance communities. Browsing seems simple, but what’s the UI for posting? Do you have a selection for which instance you want to post to or does it default to your local instance?
I really like the idea, but there’s a lot to consider.