My favorite sub was /r/AskHistorians - aggressively moderated, top comments by vetted experts, its great. Niche subs like that should have their own Lemmy server. Think thehistorychannel.social , omg it would be great. Fuck, I would _pay_ for that.

And by pay I mean I would help pay for the _hosting_ for that.

I think you’re right, and somewhere in here I think there’s an important subtlety: Somewhere along the way it seems like many of us forgot the whole concept of community.

In my recent interactions with teenagers, it feels like everyone wants to be the person with a billion followers. There’s no consideration for who those followers should be and what kind of relationship you should have with them. It’s just “number go up!”

cosigned, all of this! Cosocial began an experiment with a Lemmy server, but quickly found we didn’t have a space for what people seemed to think it should be, the whole “all of Reddit” idea.

Mastodon.social is itself a demonstration of this problem, and its paradigm encouraged things like counter.social, and even Spoutible - clones wanting to be “the new Twitter” and feeling like they needed the “everyone must BE HERE AND HERE ONLY” in order to survive.

It's really interesting to consider an instance not as a source of identity, but of topic and moderation hereof. How would things differ if you didn't register with a particular instance - you posted to it when the topic and people were right. Instances would be like mailing lists or groups.

Of course, that leaves identity unhandled. In ActivityPub that still requires an instance, so I don't know how different it *can* be, but I really think you got the right idea.

>Do we need ten thousand Technology subs? Not really. But people just tried to all make large general purpose instances with all the generic subs. Because they feel like they have to recreate reddit--ALL of them.

yeah idk why there isn't a better way to consolidate all the different "technology", " programming", "memes" boards into combined views

I believe a key solution to this is Group-to-Group following:

blog.erlend.sh/transitioning-r…

blog.erlend.sh/openindie/group…

Transitioning /r/rust to the Threadiverse

Three months ago I submitted a post to the Rust sub-reddit called Building a better /r/rust together. It quickly rose to the top and garn...

^{Open Indie}

this is activitypub by design at this point. Creating a magazine/group is done on a server. Only very large instances will get enough traction that others will follow the group on another instance. So the key problem is that the larger the instance the bigger the groups become, the better the group will spread. And the larger that community.

Until that instance goes down, losing a lot of big communities at once!

It could be partially solved by introducing additional hash tags. But yea

Part of it to is that decentralized social media is sold as more similar to what's it trying to replace than what it actually is. The usage isn't necessarily 1 to 1 but a lot of people walk into it like it will be the same and are turned off by having to learn and remaster a new way to engage.

I think decentralization should build on its strengths and be more clear and honest about what it is.

I think that's more valid for something like Reddit clones than Twitter clones. I'm on what is nominally a topic-specific server, but my followers/follows are scattered across a hundred servers. "Topics" are far more porous here. What you're choosing is the mod team.

For what is effectively a forum, yes, server-per-topic makes sense, as long as the user-traveling-federation is seamless (as it mostly is on Mastodon).

This really shows when you search for any kind topic and get 100s of communities called exactly the same, all with like 9 subscribers. All abandoned of course.

A good counter example is startrek.website that only does Star Trek related stuff