“Dam you live like this?”

You got me. I think that the approach of having to subscribe to a community on every federated instance means that discovery is kind-of broken. I get that it is ‘working as intended’ but I think that may have had unintended consequences.

The result has been monolithic communities which are all the ‘same’, and it ends up splitting interests across communities, which will inevitably slow growth, and prevent lemmy from being a true reddit killer (this is basic math of networks and how they function).

I know the developers are doing their best, but I think at a high level lemmy needs to be reconsidered. Instances should be focusing on some niche thing, like poland ball humor, or skiing, or woodworking, each with niche communities within them. For example “wintersports” might have communtieis for skiing, cross country skiing, maybe one for showing off your new skiis, etc… That way your ‘home’ is around your central interest. Then allow ‘all federation’ across all instances (if you want to).

This wouldn’t be so much a software change as a cultural change to how we approach making lemmy’s (aside from the discovery issue).

Yeah, this just makes it much more difficult for small, niche instances to grow. It focuses sign ups into monolith instances (since you don’t need to do discovery), which imo is pretty central to the issue reddit created in the first place.

Personally, I don’t think lemmys like lemmy.ml, or lemmy.world, or beehub.org should really exist. The community duplication and centralization of content is going to represent a real barrier to effectively replacing reddit (as a viable option). I think it makes a lot more sense to have smaller lemmys focused on niche topics (for example, lofi, or sound engineering, or gardening, or in my case, degenerate financial advise). Each lemmy might be composed of a few communities which are all on theme, but can be federated more broadly into the entire ecosystem, so that cool niche things can be found.

For this to function there has to be some kind of automated community discovery (like you mentioned with a crawler, which it sounds like what I’ll need to make for this to work.)

Already were seeing the issue that the centralization of users and content have created. All the drama lemmy.world and beehub.org have caused. Lemmy.ml crashing and struggling to serve content. Its all a result of centralization, which imo, is antithetical to the principal of the fediverse.

Yeah if this is happening it might explain the super confusing experience I’ve had trying to set up my own instance.