this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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I personally am not a huge fan of this idea. Instances are at the end of the day communities of their own in a way. One community may want to discuss a topic in one way and another community may want to discuss it in another way. This seems to be a way to centralize all discussion around a topic in one community, but we should rather go for decentralized communities.
But hey that's just my opinion, if others like it, go for it.
You are running an instance that is geared to serve people of an specific region. And I agree that they kind stay between the two extremes of the "group-focused" and "people-focused" instances.
The idea of topic-based instances are for the cases where the culture is more-or-less universal, but it doesn't mean that they should be absolute. So, if you want to talk about Apple stuff in general, [email protected] would make more sense, but if you are trying to reach a group of Apple users in your area, then you can have a community on your local instance as well.
When is this ever true? The idea of a "universal culture" is exactly what I mean with this encouraging centralization. Even a specific community (subreddit) on a centralized service like Reddit will have a specific culture that is not in line with any "universal culture" (it's likely to be skewed towards whatever culture exists in western english-speaking countries, just to mention an example).
I don't mean universal in the sense of "totalitarian", I mean it in the sense of "large common denominator".
Do you think that the conversation around, e.g, python programming or wood turning techniques will vary so much that it warrants many specific flavors?
This is good enough for most people and does not hinder the ability of those that are in the minority to create a different/specialized community.
Centralization/decentralization is a spectrum. No one is proposing to force everyone into a single box. The idea is only to combine efforts for the things that exist in common and to avoid unnecessary redundancies.
I don't see why not. Human culture is like a fractal after all :P. At least I don't think we should discourage creating different places for the same topics, because different approaches is part of decentralization.
I'm not discouraging it. To repeat: the idea is not to push a "there can be only one" mentality, but to set up a system that can work well for the 80% of people who can be satisfied with the median case.