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?
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!