I personally am not a huge fan of this idea. Instances are at the end of the day communities of their own in a way. One community may want to discuss a topic in one way and another community may want to discuss it in another way. This seems to be a way to centralize all discussion around a topic in one community, but we should rather go for decentralized communities.

But hey that's just my opinion, if others like it, go for it.

I think this sounds like a good idea. A problem when starting a community is that one wants to find a stable home; it might make sense to set up camp at, say, hardware.watch, but without knowing who operates it it might feel more uncertain than lemmy.world.

And then, as a result, if lemmy.world ever disappears or has problems, it'll take way too many communities with it.

If these topic-specific instances had some sort of collective ownership, I guess we could more effectively guarantee for their continued survival, and it might be more tempting for existing communities to move over there.

I'd be interested in hearing the thoughts of some admins - would !football@lemmy.world be interested in moving to [!football@soccer.forum](/c/football@soccer.forum), given the right organization?

And a piece of constructive feedback: Vague community names like !main@soccer.forum is probably less likely to attract attention than something specific like !nba@nba.space - when searching for a community, people look up the community name rather than the domain.

Community collections should be a thing. Something like /cc/Technology could pull in lemmy.world/ other instances and collections of communities. It makes it easier if one instance dies, an instance de-federates itself, or just wanting to consolidate all the different /c/Technology communities across instances.

It would also be nice if communities had the option to vote on their admins once in a while. Having individuals lord over different communities is a problem in reddit.

New users to lemmy usually aren't going to join communities if they can't register there. And people who are really invested in a topic will want to have that domain for their account. You're cutting off a lot of the users that would grow your communities.

I don't mind the idea of a collective to handle a bunch of instances, but I feel like you're going about it the wrong way. When the same person make a bunch of instances about a variety of topics, it looks as if they aren't that invested in any specific community. From my experience, the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.

Also the idea that communities can be 'neutral ground' doesn't make sense to me. People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there. In some situations it might work out fine, but if anyone thinks it's caused by how you're running your sites, they may defederate from the whole collection.

I think there may be a challenge or challenges that you haven't pinned down yet. First is: what problem does this solve?

Second is, how will people know that they are housed under the same roof, so to speak? A small instance dedicated to NBA basketball may be interesting, but if it seems disconnected then people would be wary. Small specialty instances can be shut down without warning for all sort if reasons.A consortium of instances may help with this issue, as long as it is immediately clear through common branding that they are part if the same group.

Third is that different communities have different needs.

It seems kind of slimy.

If you don't want the communities, stop squatting them. Having no users seems like just a way to keep costs down so you can hold onto more urls and is bad for the general ecosystem anyways.

If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate? So isn't it a problem if all moderators would be from different instances?

I remember after the exodus community discovery in Lemmy was hard, and it made sense to create instances like these. But nowadays with Lemmy Explorer and with multiple community promo communities I think it's not really hard to find the topics you are interested in.

I don't run any instances, but that does seem potentially like a pretty neat idea.

I am really curious about the unexpected behaviors of your instance members though! What are they doing, just treating it as a general instance and not really engaging with the local theme?

Why?

That just locks communities off. Wh ich you could readily do before Lemmy, just host a forum. Discourse is a pretty damn cool software for it. Close registrations, close visibility, and allow users in on a per-user basis. That's also a lot how Tildes works, and I remember people here don't like that very much.

I think this idea is good. I remember seeing those domain names last year. At the time it seemed muddy and uncomfortable to me, since there was a whole scheme of Reddit ghost accounts posting, while I understood there were good intentions behind it, mirrored posts were flooding users' All feed to the point I started blocking a bunch of subs, and many admins defederated.

If we can promote the community first approach where the domain is the space for discussion to be held and stored, with users connecting from across the Fediverse, this would be excellent, a good alternative to massive centralized Lemmy servers. Collective ownership would ensure preservation of content if one or more go offline.

Looks more like you are interested in more influence power, and control for yourself.

What qualifies you to be in a leadership position that directly affects content control?

Your instances are not being used the way you wanted, so you propose structural and organizational changes that, suprise, benefit your administrative influence from your instances.

You're so focused on the details of your solution, you don't seem to be holding or acknowledging any objective perspectives.

ITT: People who don't understand IAM or how to build a healthy federated structure. There should be identity services and instances just to host content separately. This way a spammer from a service won't de-federate content from everyone else and there could be easier moderation splitting the task between users and the comms.

lol I think you are right about this. You'll never get these lemmitors to see it i guess.

They are not being as used as I expected/hoped.

Have you considered it's because of this?:

My only requirement: these instances should remain closed for registrations and used only to create communities.

I wouldn't run an instance that didn't allow users to sign up as it would impede growth and uptake.

It also would have the interesting effect of pushing a lot of the load onto other instances, which doesn't seem true to the Fediverse spirit.