The main issue with the size of .world so far is just the technical stuff. Lemmy hasn't really been tested at this scale before so we're seeing various bugs and federation issues that have probably never been seen before either.

Personally I don't think the Beehaw thing was a problem for people outside of the walled garden, only for those in it. I had an account there but had to move off to keep access to my fave communities, whereas the ones on there I was using from my .world account all have alternatives elsewhere so that account wasn't "punished" like my Beehaw one was. This is of course a huge advantage of the community split, one instance can't arbitrarily cut off your access to a certain topic.

What I've been doing is just subbing to all communities for a given interest, and seeing how it goes. Sometimes there are different goals /atmosphere in each, or sometimes I'll just cross-post to all of them and see where folks are biting. I've already seen a couple of very niche communities start redirecting people to the bigger competitor so some amount of centralisation is just going to be natural over time.

Federation is going to start meaning that admins are going to have to enforce standards, and those standards haven't been fully fleshed out.

Beehaw has shown itself to be willing to temporarily defederate major servers due to spam issues. What makes Beehaw's defederation so important is because Beehaw seems to host several pseudostandard subs, so losing access to Beehaw will impact the growth of servers' user base.

I expect that the discussions Beehaw is having with other servers is likely going to create a standard set of admin responsibilities for this federation. I don't expect this to be the only federation as it seems like one of the rules is going to be "no Nazis", as it should be.

Until all the kinks with federated content are ironed out, I’m content with a few big instances. Hopefully we get tools to migrate communities with comments to different instances in future, so that we can break down big communities into smaller ones.

Your post is a bit confusing. You seem to be using Lemmy to refer to lemmy.ml? and just .world to refer to lemmy.world? Or do you mean Lemmy as in all instances? Or Lemmy the software? Or the threadiverse in general?

I think it's fine for now, personally. More important to have the overall population on the threadiverse grow and stabilize than hemming and hawing about user distribution.

What the development "should" look like is going to be different depending on who you ask. There's naturally going to be lots of people disagreeing with me here, but here's how I hope things shake out when things calm down and we have a more consistent long-term userbase:

What I hope is that we have a good mix of communal, regional and special interest instances, and a slow decline of "generalist" instances that try and be everything to everyone.

My definitions of those 4 types are as follows:

• Communal: an instance where the users predominantly share a worldview and/or social tendencies, so communication and decision-making is easier. Communities on these instances would be focused on these shared ideas.

• Regional: an instance for those from the same geographic area and that speak the same language. Communities on these instances are language-specific and region-specific versions of communities from other instances and local news.

• Special interest: an instance for those with the same profession, hobby and/or interests. Communities on these instances are all about the specific topic (whether programming, star trek or woodworking)

• Generalist: an instance with no real identity or direction outside of being an easy place to sign up.

I think the first 3 are important to the long-term health of the threadiverse, and should be emphasized.

Fast growth is always messy. Time will tell. Other than that we of couse need to do the right things now and steer into a healthy direction. But don't expect this to happen without major hiccups. It'll settle down eventually.

I'm one of the new users and I do have to say the fact that I had to jump through less hoops to sign up with .world was a big reason why I signed up there. When you're trying something new the less friction the better to acquire new users. I don't want to write an essay on why I want to get an account. I know we want to minimize bots, but there are other ways to do that than throwing unnecessary road blocks in front of users who are skeptical to join to begin with.

Whatever it is, I like it and have no issues tbh

I don't know the answer to any of your questions, but the duplicate communities thing is definitely an interesting problem to have. I mean, reddit had plenty of duplicate communities as well, but they each tended to build up their own personality which I always found interesting.

For example, I subscribe to TeslaMotors and TeslaLounge on reddit (I drive a model 3) and I find them both super valuable, but they're also super different. TeslaMotors tends to be breaking news but overly positive and gets grumpy whenever you post anything remotely negative about the company or its cars. TeslaLounge is much more realistic, where people can freely talk about the things they love about their car, but also the quirks and negatives without getting flamed.

@caephi@lemmy.world more of a pro than a con; large instances are less likely to be defederated, for the same reason that no email provider would ever block "gmail.com".

Honestly, the complaining is the standard "our clubhouse" kinda vibe you get absolutely every time this happens, where a community grows rapidly from small to medium. Literally, every single time.

While I understand the complaints, its always struck me as a little silly for people to make them in a place that was clearly intended to grow large. Like reddit for instance. Or a server called lemmy.world, seems to me to be signaling a clear intention to seek to become large.

I mean, yes, the tone changes. It's going to go through several evolutions, not just one. And every one of them will bring complaints. It's just people being people, "get off my lawn" is probably a sentiment roughly as old as the animal kingdom of biology?

That said, I deeply appreciate that the Fediverse actually has a built-in solution for them. Which they of course already know, they're just bitching and moaning, that's all.

Regarding community duplication, that is the system working as intended. If someone wants to combine them into one, it would not be difficult to make a program to do this.