You’re welcome!

We’re out here! I’m an admin at fanaticus.social. We’re a sports-only instance. We’re the instance /u/Garrathian was talking about.

If you miss your sports and want to discuss them, come on over and check us out. We have all the major sports and their teams’ communities set up and have ported the game bot (for baseball right now) over. We’re planning on having the game bots ported over before the start of the other major sports’ seasons.

We’ve only ported over the MLB game bots over to lemmy right now (because it’s the only sport in season) but we’ll be porting the other major sports bots over before the season starts! One of our users created communities for all the major sports teams in preparation for this. If you’d like to mod any let me know!

So, I’m new here, but I’m still struggling to see the advantage of smaller and more focused instances.

One benefit of focused instances is that we can sort of insulate ourselves from de-federation conflicts amongst the larger, user-focused instances. I’m not sure if you we around for the beehaw.org defederation from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works but those were 3/4 of the biggest instances and those users can no longer interact. Users from lemmy.world were basically blocked from all new content on the communities they were subscribed to on beehaw.org and vice versa.

I host a sports-focused instance fanaticus.social where all we talk about is sports. It’s a non-controversial topic (most of the time) and because we’re focused on that one topic, users from all the instances like beehaw, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, can still interact with and create content for sports without worrying about losing access to the communities they’re a part of. That’s the major advantage as far as I see it.

I don’t care about user registration counts because most of our content comes from users on general instances. In the future we will probably disable registration altogether. I have only left it open for now to reduce the friction for new fediverse users if they happen to find our instance first and want to make fanaticus their home instance.

Hi! I’m an admin of fanaticus.social. I’d like to apologize for the game bots disappearance. It’s back now! I made pinned a post about it, which you can read here.

We’re working hard to iron out the kinks in the game bots but I apologize for the inconvenience. I was on vacation last week and because of a bug, the choice was between keeping the fanaticus servers up or putting the bots to sleep.

The live game threads were some of my favorite parts of Reddit too. I can’t do anything about the small user base but porting the game bots over to lemmy and posting content is the best way I could think of to start attracting users.

Hi I’m an admin over at fanaticus.social! We’ve been hard at work porting the game bots over to lemmy. All 30 MLB teams have their bots configured and running now and we’re working on rolling out the sidebar bots, adding some new features, and porting the other four major sports bots to lemmy as well.

Check out the sidebar in !baseball@fanaticus.social for links to your team’s community.

!badminton@fanaticus.social enjoy! Let me know if you’d like to be a mod.

Oh. Good question. I don’t think so. Which one would you like me to create? Wrestling? Can I make you a mod?

We’ve got game day threads at fanaticus! I forked the popular bot from reddit and made it compatible with lemmy.

We’ve got game day threads at fanaticus! I forked the popular bot from reddit and made it compatible with lemmy.

Come on over! Everyone’s free to start their own community!

I’m pretty sure you can create your own bootstrap theme. If someone makes an old.reddit theme for Lemmy I’ll add it to my instance.

PSA: you can choose your default theme in your profile settings. I’m pretty sure the themes available are determined by your home instance’s options

Just chipping in to promote my own lemmy instance: I created !baseball@fanaticus.social and communities for the other 30 MLB teams to replace the subreddits we left behind.

I think that’s a great idea! I reached out to the moderators using the “contact the moderators” button in the sidebar on one of my favorite reddit communities but never got a response. I’m not sure if anyone read it or if Reddit just made it go away.

I don’t want to spam a bunch of individual users so I might try discord.

When you say “go down” do you mean what happens if an instance shuts down its servers for good? I think the answer to that is not a technical one. If a sever is owned by an organization (not-for-profit) and it pays it’s cloud provider bills, it’ll stay up forever.

If you mean what happens if there’s a technical issue and the server data is lost, that’s a different and solved issue. Create database backups. Easy peasy.

Oof. Well I suppose the instance owners could create another wiki app on the subdomain (there are plenty to choose from) but I’d imagine it’d be a pain to deal with auth and permissions (e.g. who gets to edit the wiki).

Interesting, what pieces of the community configuration do you think won’t port over nicely? I’m not disagreeing that Lemmy functions differently from Reddit – just getting to the point where I could make a post was enough to prove that 😆 – but I hadn’t considered things like the subreddit rules wouldn’t port over 1:1.

Now that you mention it though, does Lemmy even support community wikis?

I agree with most of the other posters, I’m done with reddit. I want the community but I don’t want the corporation. It’s not that I find admins who run lemmy instances more trustworthy by default, but the decentralized nature make me think it can be more resilient and altogether a better experience.

Boy do I wish we had RIF for lemmy though 😞

IMO, I’m not convinced that your proposed algorithm addresses the discoverability issue and we may need a broader set of functionality to make communities (and posts in those communities) more discoverable. Additionally, consider that you’re idea for this algorithm is wrong, and someone comes up with a better (more performant and/or effective) one or one with a completely different set of goals in mind. What would we do then?

I wonder if there is a need to bake this functionality directly into the source code for the lemmy-ui or lemmy backend. Perhaps a better approach would be to allow instances to implement their own sorting algorithms and the lemmy-ui/backend just add the API necessary to do so.

This is an RFC, OP’s asking for opinions/gauging interest in the work, presumably before the work begins.