Technology

It is probable that these instances follow in the footsteps of Reddit- the cycle repeats.

I don't think this is completely the case. Some instances will suffer from overzealous mods and admins, others will suffer because of absent ones, others will have too strict or too lax rules. That's unavoidable in any large number of communities. But Reddit is preparing and doing something that the vast majority of Lemmy instances will never do, Reddit is trying to prepare for an IPO and to have to show growth to shareholders on top of advertisers.

If that is something that could be done by a Lemmy instance, if that is botched it would be even easier for Lemmy users to jump ship to other instsnces and potentially defederate from the IPO instance.

Reddit isn't totally free of this problem (feature) either--You can have multiple subreddits dedicated to the same topic.

IMO while the federated communities might feel fragmented if you are used to reddit, it's the main benefit of using Lemmy and something that should be embraced. Concentrating content into only a few instances defeats the point of federation.

Take the current issue as an example: A gigantic community defederated from another gigantic community leading to a comparatively large wall between the content of those communities. Had they been smaller, the impact of this issue would therefore also be smaller. This affects other communities which get content from beehaw as well, since there's now less interaction between a large portion of the fediverse user base.

It's only natural that large communities will bubble to the top however, and there probably isn't a good answer to how to 'balance out' those communities, or if that's even beneficial at all.

I mean, my first instinct was “how can I monetize this”

I mean, people will naturally flock to the biggest instances.

But if you have even 100 ACTIVE users, they'll "discover" the vast majority of communities for you, after you manually search the most popular communities.