I’m not sure if I’ve properly explored the idea, but a specific “digital culture” would help a lot. Inside jokes, ways of speaking, emojis, memes, etc. really help an instance to distinguish itself from others.

The best example is Hexbear (ik but just hear me out for a second). Their culture is borrowed from the edgier side of the leftist internet, but they still have a style of their own. They were so recogniseable even, that a user claimed to be scared of seeing pronouns next to someone’s username because they knew it would be a comment from Hexbear (they used to be the only instance with such features, before others followed suit).

I have a hypothesis that a good amount of issolation, or at least encouraging users to only post on communities on your instance, would be good for developping some kind of culture, maybe even kinship between them.

I’d like to see organization focused instances. Like a local government that runs an instance and moderates it. NGOs, clubs, sport leagues, etc. could do it.

It might become a nightmare of overlapping content, hierarchies and responsibilities, though.

I am a big fan of content-specific instances. Some instances off the top of my head that fit this description:

• bookwormstory.social - Instance about the Ascendance of a Bookworm series
• ani.social - Instance about anime/manga/Japanese media
• slrpnk.net - Instance focused on the climate crisis and related issues
• programming.dev - Instance focused on software development
• startrek.website - Instance about Star Trek
• literature.cafe - Instance about books and writing

…and I am sure there are many others. I just think that having a focus like that provides a more interesting local instance environment than a large, generalist instance, though both have a place.

1. Have an actual mission statement beyond just being a general purpose instance (e.g Beehaw, my instance, most of the topic-based ones, etc)
2. Replace the default frontend with anything better than Lemmy-UI
3. Building on #1, try to curate the experience into something positive.
4. Block the toxic aspects as best you can by default. Don’t make new users discover and deal with the toxicity on their own. There’s plenty of other general purpose instances that will let people rawdog everything (and everyone) on the Fediverse if that’s what someone wants.
5. Focus on “quality over quantity” and block all the content repost bots / defed from the instances that do nothing but repost Reddit content. Disallow AI slop in all its forms and focus on human interactions.
6. Consider hiding/disallowing Politics communities and don’t allow accounts who post with an obvious agenda.
7. Systematically Identify and ban accounts that do nothing but downvote (if everything here displeases them so much, perhaps they should go elsewhere, ya know?)
8. Clean up duplicate posts; even if they’re slightly different, seeing the same story posted 10 times gets old for users.