this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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Pondering the nature of federated communities (lemmy.radio)
submitted 4 months ago by early_riser@lemmy.radio to c/lemmy@lemmy.radio
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OK, so I'm just thinking out loud here. Lemmy is meant to be a federated alternative to Reddit. As such, it uses Reddit's discussion format (threaded comments, voting, etc) as well as the notion of subreddits (here called communities).

But because it's federated, anyone can create an instance with the right skills and resources. These instances are naturally going to range in specificity. Some are broad in scope while others, like this one, focus on a specific topic.

What I'm curious about is how communities are handled within more narrowly focused instances. From what I've seen from the subreddits I frequented that have jumped to Lemmy, it would seem that an instance is now the equivalent to a subreddit, with Lemmy's equivalent communities being more like sub-subreddits.

Thinking in terms of old-school message boards, an instance is a forum, and communities are subforums. The key difference is that anyone can create a subforum.

I'm curious how this will affect the culture of Lemmy as a whole, how it affects moderation, etc.

Again, I'm just thinking out loud.

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[–] BenDoubleU@lemmy.radio 3 points 4 months ago

From experience: I can say that a topic instance such as ours is easier to moderate due to the fact that it's narrowly focused and the number of posts here are small in comparison to a general instance such as lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. I moderate the users that join pretty fiercely so I know that the only people that join/post from here are interested in amateur radio in some fashion. I also think we are a bit lucky in how we moderate with the fact that hams tend to moderate themselves and others already through their acts and experiences with radio communications in general (thanks everyone!).

I sorta see how you can view niche instances as having sub-subreddits. Generally though, every community out there is just a subreddit and you can subscribe and post to any of them, even though some communities do share the same topics (there are lots of other amateur radio communities out there).

I definitely like seeing people creating communities here, as long as they are amateur radio focused (see rule 5). I also would suggest making an account on a general lemmy instance as well, in case you would like to make a more generalized community. I think it's probably just good practice on any federated application to create accounts on multiple instances.

73!