A recommendation for Lemmy/Kbin instances: Focus on the topics you're best at.
I've noticed several people remarking on something that leapt out at me when I first starting using Lemmy at the beginning of the week: Topic redundancy.
There's redundancy on Reddit, too, of course, but the propensity is much higher on the fediverse. There are already hundreds of Lemmy/Kbin instances, and the fact that users on most of them can create their own verticals means we're bound to end up with hundreds of communities/magazines dedicated to broad categories Technology and Politics and Games and so on.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, that redundancy is not necessarily a bad thing. The nature of federation means that not all Technology verticals will be available to every instance, so having a choice of instances with thriving Technology verticals ends up helping instances avoid getting locked out of a topic that they may not want to host or can't handle particularly well.
But there are limits to the utility of redundancy. And there's a point at which subscribing to multiple verticals of the same topic turns counterproductive, filling your feed with so many duplicate links that they can push out worthwhile posts that you might have otherwise seen.
What's needed is a middle ground: Enough duplicates to serve everyone interested in a given topic, but not so many as to undermine the benefits of federation. Coordinating that across hundreds of instances is probably impossible, but instances can cut down on a lot of needless redundancy by being selective about which topics they cover, letting federation connect them to communities for the topics they don't.
That requires some restraint. As software, Lemmy and Kbin have taken their cues from Reddit, letting regular account-holders create their own communities. That feature wasn't originally part of Reddit— they added it when growth reached the point where admins couldn't keep up with subreddit requests. The situation is different on the fediverse, and most instances don't need to operate the same way as a single-domain website will millions of users. Beehaw, the instance I'm on, reserves community creation for the administrators, and so long as they're responsive to requests, I think that's probably the wisest course of action.
More than that, I don't think they should approve every request. Too many verticals becomes difficult to manage. And (more to the point) there's no need to cover every topic. Other instances are going to handle some better. There's no reason Beehaw users shouldn't subscribe to those.
Take politics, for example. Someone recently requested a US Politics community to keep US-centric posts from drowning out the politics of the rest of the world. That's reasonable, but why stop at US politics? Why not politics for every country? Every state or province? Every city? At what point does it stop being reasonable to subdivide the topic?
What would be better for everyone, I think, is for each instance to decide which regions they're best qualified to host a Politics vertical. Let admins who know how to handle US politics manage the community for that region. The admins who know EU politics can handle that. There can be a Politics for every region instances feel competent to cover. And once we get a sense of who covers what, people will gravitate to the ones that cover and moderate them well.