What we’re really lacking on the ui end is a way to see groups of identical communities that are on different federated platforms. Hence the idea of a dom-lemmy. The way it would work is lets say you search for a cat community called “cats”, there’s at least dozens of them out there already. Instead it would return the cats dom-lemmy, with the option to either drill down to a specific instance, or to merge all sub-lemmys called cats into a single view
the users will organically migrate to the most popular sublemmy over time & the rest will close or be ignored.
I sure hope not. It does seem to be leaning that way, but it would sort of defeat the purpose of decentralization right? I guess you can’t change the course of the river. I started a small instance with a focus on gardening, and it’s growing slowly. I wonder if smaller instances would grow more evenly if they were focused on regions/ countries/ cities or with a focus on topics? Either way it’s interesting! We’re just getting started here. Things are going to change. I wonder what we’ll say a year from now.
I have nothing to contribute to the actual conversation, I just wanted to point out the way you worded that your “gardening instance is growing slowly” was funny.
I think communities will naturally move to larger subsbutt as soon as a controversial choice is made by the mods it will split off again.
Its also important to note that all the biggest subs shouldn’t be on the same instance
Humans tend to congregate so this behaviour is reflected in the online world.
In the days before Reddit ‘won’ you used to be able to find tons of niche sites/boards cultivating smaller audiences. Beer advocate/rate beer, headfi and whatever the latest splinter was there in the audiophile community both come to mind. There’s generally more division by which each might find more ‘aligned’ or maybe their friends are on one first.
I don’t know if it’s possible to predict, social dynamics are weird and this is going to be new for a giant segment of the audience.