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 it’s a good thing, because it discourages centralisation. If we end up with a bunch of specialist instances, then diversity suffers, because everyone looking for a specific area will end up on the one single specialist instance dedicated to it.
And I say that as the admin of an instance focused on the trans and gender diverse folk. There is a reason that we don’t enforce specialisation on those topics in our instance communities though. Even so, we still tend to be “the trans instance”, when I’d much prefer it if we were just one of many, like we are on the microblog part of the fediverse.
I think Hexbear.net counts as a trans instance, it has one of if not the most active trans-specific communities on Lemmy in general and around half the userbase is queer at minimum, according to polling.
Hexbear is very protective of it’s trans users and it has a lot of them. But its “specialist area” is politics.
I think that boxes them in a bit more, being very queer and protective of queer users is related to being leftists. They are also heavily vegan, which is also informed by politics. I think everyone that’s pro-queer rights, and is a part of the queer community, kind of has to be engaged in politics as a matter of survival. Queer instances have to take anti-bigotry stances, which includes exclusion of the right-wing.
I do understand what you mean better now, though.
Well, in that regards, they’re similar to blahaj, as in, our instance doesn’t just have trans communities. Our user base is focused on trans and gender diverse folk however. Hexbear, similarly, has all sorts of communities, but their userbase is focused on shared politics, even though their areas of discussion are not restricted to that.
I can understand from the perspective that I prefer to refer to myself as a woman rather than a transwoman. Human or person works too
Yup, it combats echo instances better this way. And if one instance gets seized by a tyrant, then there is an alternative.