Would you like it to grow so all of your other, non-technical interests could have active communities? Do you want more people for moral and philosophical reasons? Or are you enjoying being in a niche? Are you happy to have a platform full of techie individuals, even in communities not explicitly tied to anything techie (much like this one)?
My answer to all of these is “yes,” so I’m not quite sure what I want. What are your thoughts?
Absolutely. I think the setup of the Fediverse in general as well as the outlook on it by the majority of admins would allow Lemmy to keep its charm even when it grows to a much bigger size.
I’d also like to see specialist instances. There could absolutely be a separate instance that has major sports, for example. Or even just the NFL. Kind of like the benefits of old forums, but with the benefits of federation and Reddit.
More geographic based instances would also be great.
Otherwise I’m not into more instances just for defederation’s sake. Email works just fine having most users in a few major hosts. Lemmy can be similar. It’s the option to leave that is important.
The geographical instances already exist for the most part. .world is an American instance in all but name, there’s lemmy.ca for Canada and some European ones.
A sports instance would be pretty funny if im being honest. Can you imagine the drama between the different communities for a specific team?
https://fanaticus.social/
There are instances like https://soccer.forum
https://nba.space
https://nfl.community
The communities aren’t super-active because the idea is that they’re remote-only, but that means they don’t get the benefit that comes from local users browsing their local feed.