I understand your concerns with moderation, but I don't see how what I am proposing would make things more difficult?
What would stop a troll to create different accounts on all the other different instances, or create another account whenever they get banned?
You are running an instance that is geared to serve people of an specific region. And I agree that they kind stay between the two extremes of the "group-focused" and "people-focused" instances.
The idea of topic-based instances are for the cases where the culture is more-or-less universal, but it doesn't mean that they should be absolute. So, if you want to talk about Apple stuff in general, !apple@hardware.watch would make more sense, but if you are trying to reach a group of Apple users in your area, then you can have a community on your local instance as well.
Yeah, I realized the issue with "main" as the name after the second time I wanted to post something and realized that the domain name is not used in the search field. I'll suck it up and just create a new community.
If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate?
Yes, I haven't had any issue moderating things from communick.news, even on communities that are not here.
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.
This approach does not address two issues that would be resolved by separating "community instances" from "people instances":
I was thinking more about the frequent cases of Mastodon instances shutting down because the admins got either tired of dealing with moderation or unable to afford the increasing operational costs. Seems like every week we get at least one instance announcing they will close up.
I didn't say that reddit's metrics were any better so your gotcha makes no sense.
These are all different questions than "why do you think it these are issues to overcome?". Perhaps it was not your intention, but your original question came off as challenging OP's complaint.
What measure of difficulty of content discovery are you using to determine that it is difficult?
Get 1000 random people, ask them to list 3 to 5 of their interests and to find them on "Lemmy". See how many successfully complete the task in less than 5 minutes. Do the same on Reddit.
What would not difficult content discovery be?
Total user count is a vanity metric. Monthly active users is more relevant and on that we are still way off from the ATH of 2.1 million from 2023.
Also, with the nature of the Fediverse where one single person can have multiple accounts, even this metric might be bogus.
They can. Servers that are delisted or go offline are removed from the counts.
Content discovery is difficult on the Fediverse. There is no "why" here. I also don't understand your question or what you are trying to imply.
Not at all. Evan is advocating for the development of ActivityPub as the basis for the social graph, not any specific application: https://cosocial.ca/@evan/113143389340566731
I am not sure what "instance members" you are referring to, here.
The topic-based instances are closed for registration, so there are no users there.
If you are referring to the communick.news instance: it is only configured to have admins creating communities on it and the general instructions are to use https://fediverser.network as the place to discover communities.