I suppose this may make sense in the case of something like Mastodon. But something as versatile and customizable as lemmy, which allows for the existence of separate topic-based communities, makes topic-based instances of lemmy not necessary.
Instead of making a new instance for a certain topic, it is usually a much better approach to just create a new community on my current lemmy instance. At least from my perspective as a user.
I find the only exception to this is censorship and moderation. If I, for any reason am unhappy with an instance’s moderation and censorship, then that is the only potential reason I can see to change and make my own.
What does everyone else think of this?
On lemmy it generally doesn’t matter as much, given the ALL tab. But you have to still consider which instances your local might be blocking…
Yep, one example was gtio.io, which occasionally had a decent topic or two, but about a third of the userbase was from lemmy.ml and another third from wolfballs.com (the former instance which attracted a political ‘right-wing’ userbase). Since lemmy.ml defederated from wolfballs.com, you wouldn’t even see most of the replies from a lemmy.ml account and have to get an extra account somewhere to reply.
Of course, those replies were almost always low-quality garbage, but I did want to see and reply to them!