cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/462140
I’ve noticed a lot of people complain that niche communities aren’t really all that present here or are difficult to find. Having some consolidated in specific instances is very helpful for discovery as well as spreading the federation around.
I started with literature.cafe (and am sticking with literature.cafe, obviously! That’s not going anywhere!) But last night I was looking at potential domains and was curious about what an art focused lemmy instance could be potentially called. I managed to snag lemmyloves.art for very very cheap, but I came to the realization as the morning came that not only is making an instance only as useful as the people who desire to use it… I currently pay for my own out of pocket and if I’m making another instance alongside this one it needs to be able to last long term.
I have the time, energy and ability to build the instance and manage it with similar principles that literature.cafe currently has (albeit slightly different to address the needs of art) but it’s just a matter of knowing if people will actually be willing to use it and if support for it would be a possibility. I can pay for literature.cafe out of pocket right now no problem, but hosting another instance that I feel very likely may need to be scaled up later on is kind of iffy thing for me to commit to right now. As well as the likelihood of it needing a team as well, knowing if there would be anyone interested in helping moderate as well would be helpful as well
Just generally curious what peoples thoughts are. I think back to the lemmy dev ama and one of the devs saying they wanted a “ravelry” focused instance to spring up lmao
Is there a reason to make it an instance instead of just creating a community (or communities - beware of branching out too much with a small user base, though) on an existing one?
It’s better to have instances (so long as they can exist long term) that have niche focuses as they tend to attract users in those niches and it spreads things out across the federation. Right now a lot of people are just crowding their communities on general purpose instances and that’s just not healthy whatsoever for the fediverse
Why/not? Also, are those drawbacks, whatever they are, enough to offset the drawbacks of actually hosting and managing a whole instance?
Yes. Very much so. Having things centralized on lemmy.world has already caused a slew of issues.