Well, surely, but this constraint is there by design. The point of these users is not to attract users, but to have thematic communities that can be followed by users elsewhere on the Fediverse.

Feel free to register a football domain. I will host it for you, free of charge.

I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.

Could be, but I guess we now just arguing opinions. And given that I am personally hold the opposite view and I don’t want to be be identified by my interests, I am not going to push for something that I fundamentally disagree with.

aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there.

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

the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.

There are two different, orthogonal issues here:

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.

People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there.

Not my experience. A few examples:

• No one complained about the mods from !linux@lemmy.ml, yet I’ve witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.
• 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.
• 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.

“rendezvous instances” is a perfect term for them…

1. I am not planning to close any instances. I am not working on them based on their current activity, but I am keeping them for a scenario where a mass migration away from Reddit actually happens.

2. When I say admins only, that can be extended to moderators as well.

At least I don’t think we should discourage creating different places for the same topics

I’m not discouraging it. To repeat: the idea is not to push a “there can be only one” mentality, but to set up a system that can work well for the 80% of people who can be satisfied with the median case.

I don’t mean universal in the sense of “totalitarian”, I mean it in the sense of “large common denominator”.

Do you think that the conversation around, e.g, python programming or wood turning techniques will vary so much that it warrants many specific flavors?

it’s likely to be skewed towards whatever culture exists in western english-speaking countries

This is good enough for most people and does not hinder the ability of those that are in the minority to create a different/specialized community.

Centralization/decentralization is a spectrum. No one is proposing to force everyone into a single box. The idea is only to combine efforts for the things that exist in common and to avoid unnecessary redundancies.

I am not sure what “instance members” you are referring to, here.

The topic-based instances are closed for registration, so there are no users there.

If you are referring to the communick.news instance: it is only configured to have admins creating communities on it and the general instructions are to use https://fediverser.network as the place to discover communities.

I understand your concerns with moderation, but I don’t see how what I am proposing would make things more difficult?

What would stop a troll to create different accounts on all the other different instances, or create another account whenever they get banned?

You are running an instance that is geared to serve people of an specific region. And I agree that they kind stay between the two extremes of the “group-focused” and “people-focused” instances.

The idea of topic-based instances are for the cases where the culture is more-or-less universal, but it doesn’t mean that they should be absolute. So, if you want to talk about Apple stuff in general, !apple@hardware.watch would make more sense, but if you are trying to reach a group of Apple users in your area, then you can have a community on your local instance as well.

Yeah, I realized the issue with “main” as the name after the second time I wanted to post something and realized that the domain name is not used in the search field. I’ll suck it up and just create a new community.

If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate?

Yes, I haven’t had any issue moderating things from communick.news, even on communities that are not here.

But nowadays with Lemmy Explorer and with multiple community promo communities I think it’s not really hard to find the topics you are interested in.

This approach does not address two issues that would be resolved by separating “community instances” from “people instances”:

1. Centralization of communities around the big instances, creating a “too big to fail” scenario. Last I checked, more than half of the top 100 communities are on LW.
2. Political/Ideological differences among larger instances causing needless fragmentation of the communities. E.g, there were discussions before about moving communities from .ml because some people didn’t want to be associated with the Lemmy devs. Some were in favor, some were against. By having the communities on neutral ground, not only this whole issue is sidestepped, it also makes it easier for both sides of the table to be able to join one single community and make the overall fediverse stronger.

But no customer signs a contract with discriminated pricing. There is no bill saying “calling numbers on network A costs $0.01/minute but B costs $0.002/minute because we have better peering with them”.

Unless you want to live in a world where net neutrality is not a thing, trying to discriminate pricing based on partner carrier is insane.

Who is “they”?

Are you at all familiar with the concept of “market segmentation”? Do you think that every user thinks and values the same as you?

Because it’s a professional service and they are willing to pay to not have to deal with:

• instance drama
• overloaded moderation teams
• other entitled users who are not paying and still find themselves in the right to complain
• admins who are doing this as hobby, so may disappear because their day job got more demanding and they can not maintain the instance
• admins who were overly enthusiastic but not experienced enough and lose a whole database
• etc, etc, etc.

There are some other benefits (specific to my business):

• I pledged to give 20% of the profits to all the open source projects I host. So people paying me are indirectly supporting the Fediverse.
• Full integration with Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix/Funkwhale
• Paying members can participate in a zero-commission crowdfunding platform (which is a shame that haven’t caught on)

You know what is funny? For years we have talked about “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product”, and yet completely ignore this when it comes to the people hosting Mastodon/Lemmy/Pleroma/Matrix servers. I don’t think people really have learned the lesson.

You are creating a strawman. I’m not saying that this particular model proposed by OP is something interesting. I’m not going to respond to that or the crypto part, but I can respond about the “money movement” required by my service :

Who will keep the money?

It’s a business. People pay for a service. The service provider keeps it.

Who will calculate what users will have to pay?

It’s a business. There is a price for the service. Service provider says “I want $X/month for the service”. Customer pays if the price is acceptable to them, and goes elsewhere if not.

Who will verify that the money is being used for the purpose it was paid for?

It’s a business. As long as the service is provided at a level that the customer is satisfied, customers have no deal in “verifying” anything.

I don’t think your analogy holds. Peering agreements is something that companies do regardless of contractual obligations with their customers.

And they certainly do not require blockchains or cryptocurrency.

But why shouldn’t we have a mechanism that can make fediverse sustainable, not reply on the kindness of humanity?

You charge from your users. The costs of any interactions from other instances will be because of your users.

Open source doesn’t means enjoy everything for free.

Please show me the receipts of every payment you’ve made for every time you’ve used some free software.

What really pisses me off is that you probably never even tried to see for yourself what type of costs and work entails running an instance, yet you are here claiming to have a solution to all of the fediverse. The more you try to argue your position the more clueless you sound.

That’s just as extreme, and just as short- sighted.

Enshittification is about companies that offer a bunch of things for “free” (actually, using VC funds) on an attempt to get to dominate the market first. When they get the users and establish a monopoly, the VC starts demanding to see the returns of their investment and that’s when enshittification happens.

Smaller service providers that make a living out of charging directly for their services do not need VC and have no reason to squeeze their users and the nature of the Fediverse ensures that no single provider can create a monopoly.

Small, independent businesses are healthy and should be encouraged. Saying “money = bad” is a recipe to keep things indefinitely small and unable to compete with the alternatives.