I realized that there are alot of inactive communities across the Lemmy and kbin instances. The beauty of decentralization is that we don’t rely on a central instance, if a fediverse instance becomes the central one that hosts the majority of posts, then if that instance goes down, we lose alot. I also suggest posting to small communities on other instances.
That is usually a good idea. Find a community instance that is more up your alley, see if it has parallel communities and post on there alone, or on there as well.
Actually in terms of the threadiverse it makes more sense to join medium to large instances that align with your interests and values. That way most of your posts and subscriptions are local. Then it makes sense to subscribe to the best other communities that are missing from your instance. This reduces fragmentation which is good.
Keep in mind your suggesting promoting fragmentation which is just nuts. Building community scale is the biggest issue at the moment. Keep in mind too that as long as there are 7 or so major instances, the threadiverse is not centralized. It is just more cost and manpower effective to join and donate to larger instances rather then everyone run their own. Presumably there is an optimal instance size. I have no idea what that is.
Long run it would be good to have some tech that fights community fragmentation like the ability to aggregate communities. The other approach is just to let the dynamics choose these and let minor communities just get starved which seems to be the current approach. Maybe that is better, I have no idea.
Having a lot of duplicate communities is a little annoying, but you do make sense.
I’d personally recommend making new communities on non-mainstream instances. Though, this does come with some problems, like visibility and instance stability (if the instance is small).
Instead of a bunch of fractured communities, I’d like to focus on one main of the a topic. If that means centralizing on one of the main couple of ones, I think that’s better for the sake of content instead of decentralization. It would grow the fedi at a faster rate this way. The centralization problem would hopefully be solved later if Lemmy were to add a redirect feature, similar to how Masotodon account transfers work by old accounts acting like transfers. That way once a larger community of centralized and grown, it’ll be able to move to another instance for the sake of decentralization.
Yeah, once the fediverse has had more opportunity to settle in and features like redirecting become available it would be cool to see communities move towards whatever instance is the best fit for the topic it fall into.
Like an instance that becomes a well known music instance, so becomes the automatic recommend for anyone looking to find a community for a specific genre or group. And a television instance that becomes the go to for any specific tv show based communities. A hobby instance where you can find like knitting or woodcarving.
Would be so much easier to find communities through topic based instances than the current random sprawl of communities.
