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?
My thoughts are what if the instance admins or mods are pricks? What if the instance shuts down?
I think the power of the fediverse is that there is redundancy with the communities on different instances. I feel like it’s a very human need to have everything neatly organized and in its place, but the internet is all about redundancy to ensure no single points of failure.
The fediverse mimics that by creating a web of small related communities, spread out over multiple instances, ran by different people, rather than a giant single community for one thing, on one instance, run by one person.
actually, the fediverse isn’t about redundancy. It’s about interoperability. Anyone being able to host their own “reddit” and still being able to communicate with the other “reddits”.
And the interoperability does bring resilience to the whole, because if a part of the system goes down (or goes to sh_t), then it’s only that part. But resilience is not quite the same as redundancy.
For redundancy you’re more looking at something like nostr, which functions with relays that can replicate the content being posted from all users of the network.
This was the case with Reddit as well, there were a lot of competing subs created due to shitty mods and rules so I don’t think it’d be much different in this case
The real issue with instances shutting down is losing access to a user account. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there would be no way to login/recover an account from an offline instance.
Im honestly not entirely sure but that seems to be the case. Everyone is worried about mod power and decentralization but what about the power of instance owners over your own account? If I take the time to link a bunch of external communities to one instance, what happens if the instance goes down? All that work is gone
This is a good point and makes me wonder: is there any interest in running a personal instance that has no communities, just for the sake of being in control of your own identity? Would that even be an appropriate thing to do? And if so, how would you convince instances to federate with you if you have no content?
Being able to host a local instance seems like a really interesting approach to owning your own user data. Also a way to have a “blog” site like the relatively new profile posts on reddit.
That’s why I made an account in every instance I was interested in. I don’t cqre about my post history and what not and if i want to keep important info I’ll just save the page to my phone.