Thanks @TiredSpider, I read all of that and realised how little I know about this issue. My gut reaction didn’t really hold up to scrutiny. I appreciate the perspective.
Attended a “gold coin donation” event at a local school recently and it was a struggle to find actual coins! I dig some up from the couch cushions, but then they had a card reader at the door anyway, so I needn’t have bothered.
Federation is a strength… but also a weakness. Lemmy is amazing but seems to have a potential - almost a default path - that’ll lead to proliferation of instances and fragmentation of communities, exactly as you’re flagging. This will hardly be in the best interest of broad adoption.
Whether merging of communities across multiple instances is possible on the back-end or not (I have no clue myself), it’ll likely boil down to how the front-end apps do it. A smart, usable UI could “cross the streams” to a degree. Though, I have no idea what that would mean for moderation and even posting.
On one hand, Lemmy basically is not ready for the influx. On the other, is anyone ever really ready when shit goes down? Right now is the purest opportunity this platform is going to get.
It’s great to see this issue being raised now. The future of the platform will be determined by how quickly we can move to address some of these things. While there’s almost no time to prepare, there’s no earlier moment than now!