I would love for instances focused on their own topics. mandra.xyz is all about science and exploration. The only reason we dont have a gaming focused instance is that we simply havent done it

Imo. This is the opposite of having a too big of a community. I think this is just a disadvantage of federation that we will eventually have to live with. The opposite is a bigger problem in my opinion, where one entity controls too much of the power.

What we really need is a better system, be it an app or chrome extension where it makes it easier for us to manage these instances version of their communities.

I don't know what that looks like but the answer isn't difficult to come up with because for the most part, all the lemmies will function the same as each other.

This is actually a very compelling OSS project to make. A Lemmy manager like rss readers of past.

there were redundant communities on reddit, there are always redundant communities, we are in a phase where we will see more not less. This is not a huge issue overall, though it will be distressing to those who have become accustom to what 6 and 7 figure subs are like.

realistically, i dont think its the best idea to hand any one server the majoirty of any topic or content, you will end up with the same problems all over again. Instead I would want to see tagging and a way to integrate community content from multiple communities. Something as simple as being able to make a community that is just a subscription list of many communities and shows thier content will work.

I think the main solution is to have an easy way of searching for existing communities before deciding to make you own. browse.feddit.de seems to be a good step in that direction to me.

This is a nothing burger. Who cares if there's a hundred different cat instances. That's already what it was.

There can only be one orange cat instance? Give it a fucking break

Maybe some functionality could be added to enable redirecting your local instance community to the more popular one? Is there any downside to something like that?