I am a big fan of content-specific instances. Some instances off the top of my head that fit this description:

• bookwormstory.social - Instance about the Ascendance of a Bookworm series
• ani.social - Instance about anime/manga/Japanese media
• slrpnk.net - Instance focused on the climate crisis and related issues
• programming.dev - Instance focused on software development
• startrek.website - Instance about Star Trek
• literature.cafe - Instance about books and writing

...and I am sure there are many others. I just think that having a focus like that provides a more interesting local instance environment than a large, generalist instance, though both have a place.

I'd always think about how neat it'd be if there was a Lemmy frontend that did theming, then themed instances could take it even further, like an LCARS interface for startrek.website

I'm a fan of local instances, like at least for a country and language.

Mastodon where you can't use the letter "e": https://www.vice.com/en/article/its-like-tweeting-but-you-cant-use-the-letter-e/ ( oulipo.social )

There is no need for this.

Language instances come to mind

• !dach@feddit.org
• !forumlibre@jlai.lu
• !chile@feddit.cl

1. Have an actual mission statement beyond just being a general purpose instance (e.g Beehaw, my instance, most of the topic-based ones, etc)
2. Replace the default frontend with anything better than Lemmy-UI
3. Building on #1, try to curate the experience
4. Block the toxic aspects as best you can by default. Don't make new users discover and deal with the toxicity on their own. There's plenty of other general purpose instances that will let people rawdog everything (and everyone) on the Fediverse if that's what someone wants.
5. Focus on "quality over quantity" and block all the content repost bots / defed from the instances that do nothing but repost Reddit content
6. Consider hiding/disallowing Politics communities and don't allow accounts who post with an obvious agenda.

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