I think as a federated alternative to Reddit, it’d make more sense for the platform to treat instances more like “subreddits” rather than “Reddits”.
This’d encourage users to look beyond their home instance, spread out the traffic, and also have the individual communities complementing rather than competing with each other. Like for example, Mander is an instance dedicated to the natural sciences, so it has a few boards which are related to that. After all, there’s no point in federating if everyone is on lemmy.ml.
It seems like this is the devs’ intent to an extent, however, I think some tweaks to lemmy.ml could make it more apparent to people. We’d want the average user to discover and begin subbing to communities from across the federation. If each instance is catering to a specific niche, but all interacting with each other, then any instance can be a “default instance”. As the closest thing to an “official” instance, I think there’s a responsibility on us to ensure that people are checking out other instances.
For the “Communities” browser, I think it’d help to include some communties from those sorts of themed instances, and add tag filters. Also have the default front page be on the “Federated” tab.
Linking with a wider range of instances would help too, especially those which aren’t as explicitly political-themed so the default feed has a wider appeal. Currently when I search “science” on the instance, it only shows results from two instances: this one and lemmygrad.ml. There’s a lot of instances posted in !announcements@lemmy.ml which’d be great additions.
Including stuff in the documentation about the sort of “instance as a subreddit” approach would help people to design their communities in a more effective way, since the gut reaction is to assume each instance is meant to offer the full Reddit experience.
An idea to decentralise a bit is appealing. Not sure about formalising instance as topic ideas or adding additional plumbing for community exploration (a recommended instance list on other instances might be a good step towards some better feature?)
Another thing which might help is creating a third tier to the deny/allow list which allows solo or small instances to post on other instances without necessarily allowing all their content in. Like Deny/Allow/Participate. This would also expose these instances by dint of usernames without building out additional features at this moment. There could be unintended consequences but the current model is not encouraging small instances that don’t want to have to have a vote from the central committee to participate.
Nice ideas, good to see them being put out there.
Your second point is pretty similar to this issue. Its a good point that it would make small instances more viable, so thats even more reason to implement it.
I do like the idea of smaller, community-focused instances. It puts less of a burden on this one, and makes sense for things like city, country, or language instances, or political communities, etc.
For the “Communities” browser, I think it’d help to include some communties from those sorts of themed instances, and add tag filters.
We do have the federated communities show up both in search, and on the communities page, but we do need to add some more filtering for it.
Also have the default front page be on the “Federated” tab.
This one I’m against tho, especially as the lemmyverse grows, and a lot more instances use open federation, the federated timeline will be full of as much noise as mastodon’s is. The default view when someone goes to your instance, should be the curated local posts.
As a previous Reddit user I find Lemmy really hard to understand. One of the first things I run in to is Lemmygrad and it’s a website but based on Lemmy?? It seemed to be more popular than the @lemmy.ml instance or whatever they are. I’m hoping to get more in to the federated side and escape big tech. It’s a little daunting trying to learn about instances, pods, servers, etc and the difference between federated and decentralized. I’d like to be able to host my own instance from my own network
