Gaming, news, tech, general literature. All of these are somewhat thriving, with a steady influx of posts and comments. At the same time, the userbase is sorely lacking for more niche communities. In my case it’d be stuff like poetry, yoga, religion, linguistics, meditation. Or many other communities I’d doubt they’d form a larger userbase here, at least to the degree that it’d foster good discussions. Communities where there are a larger amount of “normal people”, that are not tech-aware, and who have no interest in migrating off centralized corporate solutions. That just want a large space to discuss what they’re interested in.
This for me at least, makes it hard to completely leave reddit (or even Facebook and their groups!). Do you think the fediverse will ever reach the point where this would become a non-issue?
I support the Fediverse but here is one of its problems that needs to be negotiated.
As an individual poster, if an instance bans you or defederates instances that you would like to communicate with, you can wander off to another instance. It’s bad, but it’s not the worst.
As a (prospective) moderator, you have to recognize the danger that an overactive instance admin will crack down on your sub or remove you as a moderator for editorial reasons.
Reddit is pretty slimy, but for years they were broadly hands-off from a moderator perspective. Reddit’s recent actions show that a moderator can put decades of sweat equity into building and maintaining a community - and then get shut out capriciously, without communications channels or other tools to migrate any significant portion of that community. Start over from scratch.
The question for a prospective moderator is whether you can really trust the instance you’re basing your new mag on. Most communities of any size will want insurance of having an instance they control or at least an instance that makes fairly strong assurances about moderator ownership.
If you’re just driving by and you want to own the espresso machine universe on a particular instance, you can create /m/EspressoMachines and arbitrarily name a few other moderators and then wander off, but this kind of moderator is doing very little to grow or maintain the community. It’s arguably irrational to commit to that kind of labor when the rug is likely to be pulled out from under you at any time.
Maybe in the future, moderators could vote to move a mag/subreddit/community to another instance and bring all their subscribers with them automatically. idk.
I also wonder how many instances are just hosted on some old desktop sitting in a tangle of wires in the basement.
There needs to be durable instance backup/migration tools available to moderators of these communities.
I imagine that’ll eventually get done with the limited dev time Lemmy is working with here, but it’s still worth considering for a new community.