What do you think might be some fun, positive ways for instances to distinguish themselves?

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.
- The nice thing with these instances is content discovery (easy to find more communities about a single topic), but there's a downside as well: they create a lot of centralization in Lemmy.
  If you're mostly on Lemmy for a specific topic, and one instance has consolidated almost all discussion around that topic, then your entire Lemmy experience is controlled by a single instance. In other words, despite the whole network being decentralized, users in such situations are still getting effectively the same kind of downsides they would get on something like Reddit.
- Few more listed on the links here
  https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/how-to-find-communities#_3-look-through-other-instances-%F0%9F%8C%90
  mander.xyz is nice for all the STEM communities
- Crazy that there's an instance about Ascendance of a Bookworm. I've just been reading this!
- Yes, like I just learned about gearhead.town which is focused on vehicles (cars, motorcycles, etc.), which is an idea I’d had myself but I’m nowhere near skilled enough to operate an instance right now.

I'd always think about how neat it'd be if there was a Lemmy frontend that did theming, then themed instances could take it even further, like an LCARS interface for startrek.website
- There is theming. lemmy.zip uses a different theme as the default for example.
  
  Eh that looks more like just a custom color palette, I'm thinking of something way deeper than that

I'm a fan of local instances, like at least for a country and language.
- I made a list of them.
  
  Nice!

Mastodon where you can't use the letter "e": https://www.vice.com/en/article/its-like-tweeting-but-you-cant-use-the-letter-e/ ( oulipo.social )
- Lmao, that's such a goofy idea, I kinda love it

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.

Have an actual mission statement beyond just being a general purpose instance (e.g Beehaw, my instance, most of the topic-based ones, etc)
Replace the default frontend with anything better than Lemmy-UI
Building on #1, try to curate the experience into something positive.
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.
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.
Consider hiding/disallowing Politics communities and don't allow accounts who post with an obvious agenda.
Systematically Identify and ban accounts that do nothing but downvote (if everything here displeases them so much, perhaps they should go elsewhere, ya know?)
Clean up duplicate posts; even if they're slightly different, seeing the same story posted 10 times gets old for users.
- Consider hiding/disallowing Politics communities
  To add on that, lemmy.zip announced in their last update that they hide political communities from the All feed by default
  
  Yeah as much as politics are really important, especially for folks living in the US right now, it's easy for it to become like 75% of all traffic you see and it's a bit suffocating.
  Political views and frustration are something lots of lemmites have in common, but it's not healthy to stew in it 24/7 while it drowns out all other more niche communities. There's gotta be some way of finding ballance between being informed and political solidarity, and having healthy social engagements that aren't about how broken and cruel the world is
- This is a great list.

I think clear identity (I like the idea of a mission statement that someone mentioned), and a statement of the governance model of the instance would be really cool to see normalized
Erin Kissane has done a lot of fediverse research and found governance was really vital to people's experiences, good or bad, but it's difficult to asses from the outside until you have a problem and it's either handled well or poorly.

Language instances come to mind
!dach@feddit.org
!forumlibre@jlai.lu
!chile@feddit.cl

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.

There is no need for this.
- Why do you think so?

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