Of course, it’s up to everyone making Lemmy instances to decide how this’ll work, and no one is able to make those decisions for them, which is how it should be.

But if you were to make your own Lemmy instance, how would you handle it?

Personally, while I think Beehaw is a great “staging ground” of sorts, I think it’s important to remember that Lemmy instances all communicate. Just hit the “all” tab and you’ll see posts from all sorts of instances- although mostly Beehaw, since 99% of us are here.

So if I were to make a Lemmy instance- which I want to, at some point- I would make it much more focused. Almost like a subreddit with sub-sub-reddits. It’d probably be TTRPG-focused and I’d make communities for specific games and families of games that get a lot of discussion (and a catchall for everything else.) Because, once again, people from basically every Lemmy instance could subscribe to those communities so long as the instance I ran wasn’t blacklisted for one reason or another.

There’s another reason I think I’d prefer things that way- It’d make the federated nature of Lemmy stronger. With very general instances like Beehive everyone naturally congregates in one place and it’s kinda a microcosm of how Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are the internet places and I think that misses the advantages that a federated platform brings to the table.

What do you think? More focused instances or a whole bunch of general-purpose instances that just happen to be ran by different people / have different moderation policies?

Edit: …Well it turns out someone has set up a TTRPG community (Put this in the search bar to get to it while logged in: [email protected])

Edit #2: …Admittedly I’m getting a better grasp of how this all works now, and it’s more than a little frustrating that actually interacting with other servers is limited to subscribing to feeds. I guess I get it, technology-wise, sort of, is saving data across servers just not something ActivityPub can do, really? I feel like it defeats the point a bit if the majority of Lemmy instances are on a server ran by the Lemmy devs because being anywhere else is limiting.