This seems like unnecessary fragmentation. Reddit became huge because it gave people interested in a topic a one-stop place to discuss their topic. Putting the interested people together gave a network effect that attracted even more participants.

Creating new discussion venues (subreddits, usenet groups) is generally only worthwhile if an existing venue gets too crowded or cluttered to discuss a niche topic, or the niche topic becomes big enough that the existing venue is happier if the niche splits off. Example: there is a general programming forum, Rust gets invented and people talk about it there, then Rust becomes a big enough topic that a Rust forum is warranted.

I’m a not-even-newbie to Rust but I’d be happier if the lemmy.ml and lemmyrs.org Rust forums somehow got merged. Because of federation, I’m basically indifferent to which Lemmy instance actually hosts it.

I don’t see a reason to migrate to another community. What guarantee is there that you don’t loose interest in hosting lemmy next week? The lemmy.ml instance is far older and I don’t think it will disappear any time soon, also the mod of this community is one of the lemmy maintainers (which is incidentally also written in rust).

Whoa thanks! I subbed to your two communities over there.

I like the idea of having topic-based instances, because then you can have a collection of communities dedicated to it. IE https://lemmyrs.org/c/{memes, news, support}, etc.