this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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Proposal to create a collective to own the topic-based Lemmy instances (raphael.lullis.net)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I have a number of Lemmy instances meant for discussion groups around specific topics. They are not being as used as I expected/hoped. I would like to set them up in a way that they can be owned by a consortium of different admins so that they are collectively owned. My only requirement: these instances should remain closed for registrations and used only to create communities.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there.

Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don't have an account in the same server.

the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.

There are two different, orthogonal issues here:

  1. people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
  2. people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.

The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.

People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there.

Not my experience. A few examples:

  • No one complained about the mods from [email protected], yet I've witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.
  • Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to "choose" between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.
  • Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don't have an account in the same server.

For people who've used lemmy or the rest of the fediverse yes, but most people don't know that yet. If someone shares a post from your site with their friends or a facebook group, they're not going to look into how lemmy works to sign up elsewhere.

  1. people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
  2. people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.

The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.

I'd prefer it if topic specific instances were more popular too. I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.

I feel a technical solution like federation pulling in lists of communities with would help more with discoverability.

Not my experience. A few examples:

  • No one complained about the mods from [email protected], yet I've witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.

I'm not sure how that goes against what I said. That's mostly people disliking the admins.

  • Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to "choose" between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.

Similar issues could happen even if users are separate from the communities. Beehaw could defederate your instances, and lemmy world could defederate programming dev or something, and people would need other accounts if they want to see everything.

  • Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.

Me too. I usually avoid lemmy world communities unless there isn't an active community elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.

Could be, but I guess we now just arguing opinions. And given that I am personally hold the opposite view and I don't want to be be identified by my interests, I am not going to push for something that I fundamentally disagree with.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don’t have an account in the same server.

[citation needed], because it disagrees with the "whole point" I can find