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Suggestion: prioritize topic-based instances as the recommended lemmy communities.
(self.fediverser_network)
this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Fediverser Network
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Fediverser is a project to build all the required tools to help people leave legacy social networks and to join the fediverse. Currently, it provides a web application that runs alongside a traditional Lemmy service to provide the following functionality:
- Create a map between subreddits and the corresponding Lemmy communities
- Let users signup to the Lemmy instance directly by using their reddit information, and automatically subscribe them to the lemmy communities provided by the internal reddit <-> lemmy map
- (Optional): use the subreddit to lemmy map to run a mirroring tool that can take posts and comments from the subreddits and place them in the corresponding lemmy community.
The Fediverser Network is a website that aims to crowdsource the information used by the different fediverser deployments and to coordinate all users and instance admins.
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And I am not sure if I agree that "topic-specific instances are more likely to have performance issues". Plenty of "generic" instances also had issues and went under as well, but I do agree that any instance that gets to be recommended should have some good history about uptime, adherence to standard moderation rules, code of conduct, etc...
Also, I believe it would be healthier to federation if we had a cleaner separation between "servers that are for communities" and "servers that are home to the end people". For example, I've seen lots of people on /r/redditalternatives backing away from Lemmy because they were interacting with some community on lemmy.ml, heard about the lemmy developers' political views and got turned off by the whole thing.
If most people join servers that are completely "neutral" in ideology, it would mean that all the politics would be assciated with the communities and not the "generic" servers themselves. It's also a lot easier to say "we will block instance X because of their communities" then to say "we will block instance Y because we don't like some of the people there", which leads to some people getting caught in a cross-fire.
I misspoke, what I meant was that smaller instances are more likely to have issues, and almost all of the large instances are general purpose.
I totally agree and I think the model you are describing is the natural evolution of this platform. Lemmy.myserv.one is a good example of a server that doesn't host local content but simply hosts user accounts for browsing the wider threadiverse. Striving towards that ideal is definitely a worthwhile goal.
However, it will take a long time to build towards that type of structure, and in the meantime we have to make the most of the current, largely haphazard scattering of servers/communities. I would just emphasize that the priority should be that recommended communities are (1) active, (2) well-moderated, (3) on topic. If those three criteria are met by multiple communities, then by all means, prioritize the communities on topic-specific instances. But I would caution against prioritizing other factors above the three that I mentioned.
I'm glad we share the same view. A lot of the work on communick is to do exactly this:
Huh, I've even got an account here and I didn't realize things worked like that. Very cool, keep up the hard work and innovation 💡