It feels like they’re two different roles. It might be better to have user-orientated servers that prioritise federation of content and only have a couple of meta-style communities, and other servers which prioritise being the go-to place for discussion on a particular topic and less a place that manages a large number of user accounts.
It just seems like two really distinct roles all servers are trying to do at the same time, and it’s leading to larger sites with a lot of users duplicating all the same subs, rather than there being any particular spot for certain types of discussion.
It also means the server hosting a particular type of discussion might defed certain instances to prevent trolling when it’s a sensitive topic, but it wouldn’t affect a large userbase who have that as their home server, it would only be moderating the discussion for the content areas they specialise in.
Thoughts?
I think also one of the concerns is - well, one of my fav subs used to be bonsai. If each server has it’s own bonsai sub it’ll be three users and never hit critical mass, so no bonsai discussion. There will be heaps of discussion in a small handful of the most mainstream subs on each server, but smaller communities may never really take off. I think it’s those niche interests that really help adoption, and I’d like to see Lemmy take off because I love finding those communities.
There are a number of geographic servers that are already the obvious choice for discussion around living in a particular place, I just wonder if we can find a way to create a logical home for some of the other more niche interests so they can grow as well - I mean, we already have a bunch of tech based ones (like all the programming discussion on programming.dev), but I’m worried that it will never take off for things that aren’t tech based, and I think those other communities make a platform useful.
Fragmentation has advantages, sometimes the same topics duplicated across servers means you can find a better community, but it means only topics with really broad appeal (which are probably going to be the same topics between a lot of servers) are going to have active users. So we’ll end up with a really bland selection of the same discussions and no niche interest communities, leading to a lack of diversity and uninteresting content.