I think community discovery can (and should) be improved for sure!
Currently it's true that you can use topic-centered instances for this, I do this myself as well, but I do think it has quite significant downsides in terms of creating pockets of centralization. For example, if you're a user who is ONLY interested in french cinema (or any specific topic) on Lemmy, and all of the related communities and other invested users are on a single instance, then for you, the experience is absolutely no different from any centralized platform - the french cinema instance admins have 100% control over your Lemmy experience.
IMO, in practical terms, 3 key things should imapct instance choice:
Basic instance rules (including things like community creation policy, nsfw allowed, etc)
Federation policy
Instance infrastructure (hardware & how it's managed)
Content specialization really shouldn't matter IMO, because as long as the federation policy is OK for you, then you can participate in any communities, regardless of what instance they are on. In other words, even if you're super interested in french cinema, there is no need to centralize all users interested in this topic on a single french cinema instance. Thanks to federation, users from all instances (accounting for federation policy) should be able to become fully fledged participants in any french cinema communities.
Of the points I listed above, #1 and #2 are easier to include in an instance introduction, I'm not sure how to properly and reliably reflect #3 in any kind of overview. At the end of the day, I think most users tend to figure out their long-term home instance a while after they first join Lemmy, and quite often, it's not their original instance, so maybe it's not that important to emphasize the initial instance choice too much?
Admins still get (and look at) reports even from communities without mods. In the past, if such a community has started causing issues, then I have closed it down, but based on a lack of reports, I don't think there's any issue right now with either of those communities.
By the way, anybody is welcome to take over communities with inactive (or missing) mods on lemm.ee - just drop me a message and I'll be happy to transfer the community.
If I have several backends that more or less depend on each other anyway (for example: Lemmy + pict-rs), then I will create separate databases for them within a single postgres - reason being, if something bad happens to the database for one of them, then it affects the other one as well anyway, so there isn't much to gain from isolating the databases.
Conversely, for completely unrelated services, I will always set up separate postgres instances, for full isolation.
I think it's offline right now, but when I checked it before, I immediately noticed that https://next.lemmy.zip is significantly slower than https://next.lemm.ee, and it would be interesting to find out the reasons. Can you share a few details about your deployment? I'm interested in:
RAM
CPU
Is it connecting directly to your Lemmy backend, or through a proxy/proxies?
What is the latency in ms between next.lemmy.zip and your Lemmy backend?
Sorry about that! It's a mitigation we have in place which has helped protect against several attacks so far, but unfortunately it has the trade-off of sometimes hurting normal users. Are you browsing with a VPN or Tor?
The goal is to make it completely possible for anybody to use as a full replacement for the lemmy-ui if they wish, but I think including it as a the UI for the "default" Lemmy setup is not going to happen. Not that I would have anything against it, but I mean, lemmy-ui is still completely functional, and lemmy-ui-leptos probably isn't too far off either at this point.
I am personally super used to the non-centered UI from over a decade of using Reddit. I mean, I can understand where you're coming from, but it just feels natural to me at this point 😃I will consider adding another centered layout at some point as well
The community logos getting cut off will definitely be fixed.
Wow, seems the text is totally messed up for light-mode users 😅 The issue is that there is some default light-mode styling applied to any Markdown text, but I don't have light mode colors defined for any other element. I will fix it in a moment, thanks for letting me know.
For now, I am just starting with a single dark theme, but once I have all initial features in place, I could consider additional themes as well!
Edit: should be fixed now, thanks again for letting me know!
Another test reply