Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don’t have an account in the same server.

For people who’ve used lemmy or the rest of the fediverse yes, but most people don’t know that yet. If someone shares a post from your site with their friends or a facebook group, they’re not going to look into how lemmy works to sign up elsewhere.

1. people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
2. people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.

The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.

I’d prefer it if topic specific instances were more popular too. I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.

I feel a technical solution like federation pulling in lists of communities with would help more with discoverability.

Not my experience. A few examples:

• No one complained about the mods from [email protected], yet I’ve witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.

I’m not sure how that goes against what I said. That’s mostly people disliking the admins.

• Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to “choose” between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.

Similar issues could happen even if users are separate from the communities. Beehaw could defederate your instances, and lemmy world could defederate programming dev or something, and people would need other accounts if they want to see everything.

• Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.

Me too. I usually avoid lemmy world communities unless there isn’t an active community elsewhere.

New users to lemmy usually aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there. And people who are really invested in a topic will want to have that domain for their account. You’re cutting off a lot of the users that would grow your communities.

I don’t mind the idea of a collective to handle a bunch of instances, but I feel like you’re going about it the wrong way. When the same person make a bunch of instances about a variety of topics, it looks as if they aren’t that invested in any specific community. From my experience, the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.

Also the idea that communities can be ‘neutral ground’ doesn’t make sense to me. People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there. In some situations it might work out fine, but if anyone thinks it’s caused by how you’re running your sites, they may defederate from the whole collection.

There’s lem.el for Emacs.

There was another one but it doesn’t work anymore. It hasn’t been updated in 3 years.

The creator of pixelfed is working on a tiktok alternative loops, although for now it’s in private beta.

For a starting point that is available now, you could look at Pixeldroid, an open source pixelfed app.

Besides the ones already mentioned:

• The FSF has some channels at https://framatube.org/a/fsf

• There’s a bunch of KDE related channels at https://tube.kockatoo.org

• Blender has several channels at https://video.blender.org

• https://peertube.touhoppai.moe/a/shichimi has Krita tutorials from the creator of the Pepper and Carrot webcomic.

• https://tilvids.com/a/martin_owens from someone who works on Inkscape.

• https://tilvids.com/a/togglejam looks at the science behind fictional games and shows.

• https://diode.zone/c/andrewtropin has a bunch of scheme and guix related videos

• There’s some anarchist channels on https://kolektiva.media like CrimethInc and subMedia.

A couple of gaming related accounts/channels:

• https://subscribeto.me/a/gbryant

• https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/c/boilingsteam

There’s also sepiasearch.org for PeerTube videos.

There’s a list of people that have agreed to block it at https://fedipact.online/

About 20k are probably from hexbear, which migrated from their own distant fork of lemmy to the current version, so now they show up in a lot of trackers. They still haven’t enabled federation yet though.

They both do try to do roughly the same thing. If you go to another Mastodon website and try to follow, reply, etc. it will redirect you to do that on your mastodon instance.

For Mastodon there’s FediAct or Mastodon - Simplified Federation.