It feels like many Lemmy instances end up trying to be “Reddit replacements,” which results in dozens of very similar communities with overlapping topics. I wonder if it would make more sense for each instance to focus on a broad topic, like sports, literature, or technology, and then have communities for the subtopics within that.
What are your thoughts? Do you prefer many general instances, or would you rather see topic-focused instances?
I think chaotic instances without a clear focus are superior in terms of a stable fediverse. If you have a ‘main’ instance for programming stuff, queer topics, German content etc. you’re always at risk that the instance goes down and all content and communities die along.
Instances going down is a realistic scenario. Hacking / DDOS attacks, government takedown requests, copyright issues, hosting issues, admins losing interest… The more distributed certain topics are across instances, the more resilent they are against all these vectors.