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?

  • Landrin201
    1·
    2 years ago

    I think that right now there are so many users coming in that it’s natural we will se a lot of duplicate communities in different instances. I think once things stabilize those communities can start merging in the “correct” instances. All the new people are new, and don’t really fully understand the concept- the are looking for a Reddit alternative. Once more people start to grasp the concept, I think we’ll see some shuffling around of users and communities to places where they fit better.

    I think the documentation needs to get updated to be shorter and more concise, and also to try to impart “the way this is supposed to work” to the user, which I think it currently doesn’t (or if it does, it doesn’t do it in the earlier sections of the documentation).