I know that the purpose of Lemmy is to be split into instances and stuff to stay independent or whatever, but - imo - if it really wants to become a true alternative for Reddit it needs one place for users to land. Something like “LEMMY.COM” where you can see all instances + all communities, where you can log into your instance, maybe even log into more than one instance at once (let’s be honest, who doesn’t have a separate porn account these days lul)
The thing is, most of us used Reddit until now instead of Lemmy because Reddit did the overall browsing experience a lot better. Yeah it needed the help of third party apps for that, true, but I could just open reddit, look at r/all or my subscribed subreddits and be done with it. Being on Lemmy feels like “oh yeah, this is a great idea, but wow it is very inconvenient to look through this place”
(Btw, I LOVE the lemmy logo!)
Private and Public Mastodon
https://jort.link/www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/30/Mastodon-Privacy-and-Search
I mean the point here is that making anything instance independent is gonna be anti-federation. Centralized hub is not the only way and this is not reddit, you may try to adapt
Why not have a peer to peer “Popular” list that is programmed to update every so often. These could be stored on each instance. Have the instances communicate without them being Dependant in a centralized location.