Hi! Creator of https://programming.dev here. I am actually the main mod of /r/experienceddevs and created the instance as a new home for all programming topics. One of the communities I was (am?) most excited about hosting is the Rust community. Along with that I really thought that having a general purpose instance that is easy to type is more ideal than several split communities.

People are more likely to participate if the website is easy to remember and type (e.g. reddit, twitter, facebook) compared to all of these very very hard to remember names (not that lemmyrs.org is hard to remember, but many of the other instances are, and I don’t think putting the name of the software in the url is a great idea, but that’s neither here nor there).

Finally, I have already put significant work into making sure that even if I no longer want to host or if something happens to me that the community can keep the site running without me! I have numerous admins, a github org, a chat community, we are working on improvements to the server to make it more stable (we rolled out cloudflare today), and hope to commit many upstream changes to lemmy to improve it.

Of course, if any community is going to choose to run their own instance I would expect it to be the Rust community, but also would hope that the community could look at my track record and moderation style and see that programming.dev would be a good instance for them to call home. I frequent the /r/rust sub, even though I am not a rust dev (I’ve built a few projects, but nothing good), I’ve always wished I was and I thought this was a good chance to finally become one.

To your points though, I feel like lemmy.ml is not a sustainable instance. From the perspective of ‘creating another reddit’, if any one instance allows any communities to be created then eventually they will not be able to handle it, which you touch on with your moderation point. !programming.dev is a purpose built instance. It is about programming. You can federate to other instances like normal, but the communities there will always be aimed around programming.

To your second point, I would hope that my /r/experienceddevs community would speak up for me here to how I run communities. I do not tolerate hate, I try to condone proper debate, I allow the people to make the rules (I am no dictator, I simply do what the community wishes…up to a point). I try to be open and honest about what things are happening behind the scenes. And I allow others to lead when they know more than me.

To your final point: rules matter more to the community than to the instance. Currently I have no rules on programming.dev, besides the implicit one that, you know, it’s about programming. I expect each community and their moderators to create and enforce rules, almost exactly like Reddit. I’m sure we will create rules over time, but it will be because users came together to create the rules in !meta@programming.dev, not because I unilaterally wrote some up and forced them on people.

Finally, I would love to have the Rust community come and participate. Help us make the software better. We have the ability to build a great thing here, and with so many programmers in one group, we really can do a good thing for the world.