I've noticed a lot of people complain that niche communities aren't really all that present here or are difficult to find. Having some consolidated in specific instances is very helpful for discovery as well as spreading the federation around.

I started with literature.cafe (and am sticking with literature.cafe, obviously! That's not going anywhere!) But last night I was looking at potential domains and was curious about what an art focused lemmy instance could be potentially called. I managed to snag lemmyloves.art for very very cheap, but I came to the realization as the morning came that not only is making an instance only as useful as the people who desire to use it... I currently pay for my own out of pocket and if I'm making another instance alongside this one it needs to be able to last long term.

I have the time, energy and ability to build the instance and manage it with similar principles that literature.cafe currently has (albeit slightly different to address the needs of art) but it's just a matter of knowing if people will actually be willing to use it and if support for it would be a possibility. I can pay for literature.cafe out of pocket right now no problem, but hosting another instance that I feel very likely may need to be scaled up later on is kind of iffy thing for me to commit to right now. As well as the likelihood of it needing a team as well, knowing if there would be anyone interested in helping moderate as well would be helpful as well

Just generally curious what peoples thoughts are. I think back to the lemmy dev ama and one of the devs saying they wanted a "ravelry" focused instance to spring up lmao

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[–] gabe@literature.cafe 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Posting the comment I made over on !fediverse@lemmy.ml but I checked and made some calculations and unfortunately I just don't have the budget for the initial cost this month AND this instance alongside that. Probably next month I would. Sorry yall.

[–] amio@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there a reason to make it an instance instead of just creating a community (or communities - beware of branching out too much with a small user base, though) on an existing one?

[–] gabe@literature.cafe 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's better to have instances (so long as they can exist long term) that have niche focuses as they tend to attract users in those niches and it spreads things out across the federation. Right now a lot of people are just crowding their communities on general purpose instances and that's just not healthy whatsoever for the fediverse

[–] amio@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why/not? Also, are those drawbacks, whatever they are, enough to offset the drawbacks of actually hosting and managing a whole instance?

[–] gabe@literature.cafe 1 points 1 year ago

Yes. Very much so. Having things centralized on lemmy.world has already caused a slew of issues.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve been enjoying !pics@lemmy.world , !traditional_art@lemmy.world and !psychedelic_artwork@psychedelia.ink here and thinking the same thing! Lemmy works quite well as an image board IMO.

[–] Nighed@sffa.community 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

A bit late - but here is the current list of imaginary communities:

[–] sbrl@fedia.io 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

New account, but the imaginarykanto link there doesn't work for me? I'm confused.

Did I pick the wrong server or something? Rather new to kbin.

[–] ShittyKopper@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

OP is using the /c/ link format which does not work in Kbin (which you're on)

The correct way to link communities cross-everything is like !imaginarykanto@lemm.ee ([!imaginarykanto@lemm.ee](/c/imaginarykanto@lemm.ee)) yet people still think /c/ is anything but an implementation detail (as they're accustomed to Reddit's /r/)

[–] sbrl@fedia.io 1 points 1 year ago

Ahhh that makes sense. Thanks for the explanation! Still learning Kbin. It's more complicated than eg. Mastodon.

[–] Nighed@sffa.community 1 points 1 year ago

I have updated the post with that format of link @sbrl@fedia.io you should be able to use them all now if ShittyKopper is correct.

This list was made by someone else and copied, I think I understand why they did it that way though - you can't format those links nicely, the following doesn't work: * [Imaginary Kanto]([!imaginarykanto@lemm.ee](/c/imaginarykanto@lemm.ee)) Looking like this (tries to link to a post or something?:

Imaginary Kanto

[–] CrypticFawn@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wouldn't a community make more sense? It can be made on an instance that already exists.

[–] gabe@literature.cafe 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

An instance dedicated to art and art focused things would help spread the federation out and attract users who are focused primarily on art. It's really not a good idea to put everything on one instance. It's a thing that occurs on the fediverse, outside of specific instances there are niche and hobby focused instances that attract a lot of people. Everyone is just crowding all their communities into the general purpose instances and that's not really how the fediverse is intended to work.

[–] ratboy@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had experience with mastodon several years ago and so when I moved over here from Reddit I was excited to try and find an instance that resonated with me but alas, the only niche ones are like, furry instances, porn instances, and tech instances. Bummed that there haven't been more that have themes.

[–] gabe@literature.cafe 1 points 1 year ago

That's exactly why I'm asking, to maybe make a new one with a new theme :)

[–] wrath-sedan@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah I’ve really loved the culture of niche instances like startrek.website, lebowski.social, sffa.alliance. I think they provide an interesting and friendly local feed, have a more general federated feed, and then of course you can have your own subs. I say go for it!

[–] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

I think that having different communities for different kinds of art, on an art-focused instance makes sense.

You can have digital art community, painting community, photography community, music, video, etc.

Some of those could even be subdivided like landscape photography, macro photography, portraits, urban life, etc.

Tldr I think there enough different kinds of art that a single community wouldn't do it justice.