Of course, it’s up to everyone making Lemmy instances to decide how this’ll work, and no one is able to make those decisions for them, which is how it should be.

But if you were to make your own Lemmy instance, how would you handle it?

Personally, while I think Beehaw is a great “staging ground” of sorts, I think it’s important to remember that Lemmy instances all communicate. Just hit the “all” tab and you’ll see posts from all sorts of instances- although mostly Beehaw, since 99% of us are here.

So if I were to make a Lemmy instance- which I want to, at some point- I would make it much more focused. Almost like a subreddit with sub-sub-reddits. It’d probably be TTRPG-focused and I’d make communities for specific games and families of games that get a lot of discussion (and a catchall for everything else.) Because, once again, people from basically every Lemmy instance could subscribe to those communities so long as the instance I ran wasn’t blacklisted for one reason or another.

There’s another reason I think I’d prefer things that way- It’d make the federated nature of Lemmy stronger. With very general instances like Beehive everyone naturally congregates in one place and it’s kinda a microcosm of how Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are the internet places and I think that misses the advantages that a federated platform brings to the table.

What do you think? More focused instances or a whole bunch of general-purpose instances that just happen to be ran by different people / have different moderation policies?

Edit: …Well it turns out someone has set up a TTRPG community (Put this in the search bar to get to it while logged in: !rpg@lemmy.ml)

Edit #2: …Admittedly I’m getting a better grasp of how this all works now, and it’s more than a little frustrating that actually interacting with other servers is limited to subscribing to feeds. I guess I get it, technology-wise, sort of, is saving data across servers just not something ActivityPub can do, really? I feel like it defeats the point a bit if the majority of Lemmy instances are on a server ran by the Lemmy devs because being anywhere else is limiting.

  •  mifuyne   ( @mifuyne@beehaw.org ) English
    9•11 months ago

    I’m with you there. I think there’s value in specialized instances.

    The internet used to be small, but expansive. It became big, but concentrated.

    — @Kichae@kbin.social - source

    Before Facebook and Twitter and Reddit became the gen-pop’s definition of “the Internet,” there were a lot of forums and chat rooms for specific interests, or specific groups of interests. The problem was that you’d need an account with each one of those forums and chat servers.

    Federation allows us to go back to small communities, expansive network, but with the added advantage of only really needing one account for all of it.

    Personally, I would be interested in setting up a play-by-post, or an RP (freeform, with dice, etc) instance. At least, test and see how the format could work within something like Lemmy. Probably not well! But you never know.

    The lack of plugin support might be a hurdle…or an opportunity. I suppose one could make a dice-rolling bot for Lemmy 🤔

    My motivation for something like this is mostly that the more people with federated accounts, the easier it will be for people to participate and not have to worry about yet another account creation process. In fact, for something this specialize, I could run lemmy as a blogging platform. The setup is made so that moderators of communities can create posts but anyone can comment on them. That way, GMs would be the mods of their own campaign communities and responsible for starting new threads as needed.

    It’s not a fully fleshed out idea. In fact, it’s something I cobbled together just now. So I haven’t considered the pros and cons and other obvious hurdles.

      •  mifuyne   ( @mifuyne@beehaw.org ) English
        4•11 months ago

        I know what you mean. Unfortunately for me, I’m the type to check back frequently. I’m doing it right now with Beehaw, LOL.

        Discord also sucks for archival reasons. I know they’ve rolled out the forum feature, but it’s all walled garden. People can’t drop by and lurk. Search is not fun. Not to mention Discord also tucks away older posts so if there’s a lot of threads, have fun trying to find the beginning of the campaign! You can’t change how they sort, either. It’s one of those things where they’re good for some things, but I really wish they would stay specialized rather than trying to be everything.