36
Created this account so I could create the community. Decided on lemm.ee because my main account is on aussie.zone, which does not allow community creation (and limits its communities to things about Australia). Figured lemm.ee is better than lemmy.world due to the latter's performance/federation issues.
Yeah, I have created a bunch of topic-based instances with the idea of having communities created in "neutral ground" and avoiding issues like "instance from instance Z has defederated from X and Y, so now the people need to create duplicate communities and/or duplicate accounts".
The whole list of instances is on the sidebar of !communick_news_network@communick.news if you are interested.
Also, because I got someone reporting me for not "disclosing my interests". Communick is a business. It makes money by providing paid access accounts to Fediverse services, like communick.news and mastodon.communick.com. These topic-based instances however are never going to be closed or exclusive to paying customers. Anyone that wants to create a new community based on a specific interest, just send me a DM and I will happily create it and make you a moderator. I created them to help organize communities during the migration and to distribute the load from all the mirrored content from alien.top.
Yeah I really like the idea of topic-based instances. There are some issues doing it that way with discovery, and potentially with what happens when communities split (see for example what happened with !risa@startrek.website splitting to !tenforward@lemmy.world), but on the whole I really like the way it can reduce the drama caused by entirely unrelated factors. I'm a big fan of ttrpg.network for that reason, and I guess you could describe my main home instance of aussie.zone as being one, too.
I'm curious about that business. With so many Mastodon and other fediverse instances available for free to anyone, what's the business model for a paid service?
Nice, I went ahead and created !aom@level-up.zone . As soon as you make a post there I can make you a moderator as well.
I'm really glad to see more people getting the point of these instances. Reducing drama is certainly one of the biggest factors, and "good fences make good neighbors" is a good principle here.
It's a difficult one, if I am being honest. I started this as a side project because I believed that with all the abuses from Facebook and Twitter, people would finally understand that "if you are not paying for the product, you are the product" is not just a nice slogan. Unfortunately, it seems that the large majority of people will rather live jumping from instance to instance and project to project instead of paying a few bucks per month to support independent developers.
But to give you a more cheerful response, Communick is not just about Fediverse. My background is in telecommunications, and the idea is to offer any type of service for messaging that is based on open standards, which also includes VoIP. It also provides Matrix and I've been trying to figure out how I can add support for SIP calling in a way that could make this a compelling alternative for Digital nomads that need to deal with multiple phone numbers.
Looking at the Fediverse only, some reasons to charge for access:
I appreciate it, and if I ever do get around to doing something about aoe2 or aoe4 I may use that instance, or if I see someone else express interest in creating game-related communities I'll recommend they head in your direction. But for now I've already created it on this instance, and don't see the benefits as being strong enough to outweigh that.