Proposal to create a collective to own the topic-based Lemmy instances - eviltoast

I have a number of Lemmy instances meant for discussion groups around specific topics. They are not being as used as I expected/hoped. I would like to set them up in a way that they can be owned by a consortium of different admins so that they are collectively owned. My only requirement: these instances should remain closed for registrations and used only to create communities.

  • aasatru@kbin.earth
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    2 months ago

    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, 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.

    • UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev
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      2 months ago

      I’d be interested in hearing the thoughts of some admins - would !football@lemmy.world be interested in moving to !football@soccer.forum, given the right organization?

      I’m not the main mod of !football@lemmy.world so it’s really not my decision to make, but moving the community to a domain with the word soccer in it is a tough pill to swallow. As silly as it may sound, there’s a lot of people that don’t like having football referred to as soccer.

      Moving away from lemmy.world and their annoying VPN restrictions would be nice though.

      • aasatru@kbin.earth
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        2 months ago

        I had a feeling that would be an issue!

        On the one hand, football@soccer would be a good compromise.

        On the other, we’re right, the Americans are wrong. Simple as that. So I sympathise with the lack of willingness to compromise on the matter.

              • aasatru@kbin.earth
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                2 months ago

                I’m sure the Irish call it football when they speak English, but what about in Irish? If Google translate to Irish is trustable,

                English to Irish Football = Peil

                But also Soccer = Sacar

                So maybe there’s two accepted variants. But where does Pail come from anyway? Let’s translate it back to English:

                Peil = Very big potato

                So most of the world plays football, some strange corners of it play soccer, and the Irish play very big potato.

                I’d love if a native speaker could confirm this. #Irish #Gaeilge #football @gaeilge@a.gup.pe @football@a.gup.pe

        • UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev
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          2 months ago

          As I’m sure my home instance reveals, I do like the idea of focused instances. I think a general sports focused instance would be better than sport specific instances though, at least with lemmy’s current size. It’s not sustainable to pop up an instance for every sport out there, like strongman or arm wrestling.

          And people would also have to be able to sign up to the instance. Which if I remember correctly you had a very different opinion on when you spoke to Snowe on !meta@programming.dev about programming.dev. Just from a technical standpoint, the federation latency and general wonkiness is real and is why my football bots are running on Lemmy.world despite programming.dev being my preferred instance. Near real-time communication is important during live games where minutes may drastically change the topic.

          And while I’m sympathetic to your cause, inertia is a real thing and lemmy.world is competently run, even if I strongly disagree with their VPN restriction.

          If you somehow managed to convince the other sports communities to migrate to a common instance I’d happily follow along though, but I find it very unlikely happen. ReadyUser31@lemmy.world is the one primarily in charge of !football@lemmy.world

    • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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      2 months ago

      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.