But wouldn’t it be great if the knitting community (for example) on beehaw.org, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and feddit.de would be merged for me into one entity for a better browsing experience?
Why wouldn’t they merge on one instance? Seems easier, and can be done today compared to having to ask the developers to implement a complex feature.
And on Lemmy some instances duplicate everything. For example beehaw
Are they not allowed to?
Beehaw exists for people who wanted a heavily-moderated space, and they seem to be doing well activity-wise. Do you want to force them with the rest of the instances?
Don’t want to be ostracized because your user is registered on the wrong politic instance ? Join biggest instance instead.
There are plenty of politically neutral instance. Most of them are, actually, the only ones that come to mind as politically oriented are hexbear, lemmygrad and to an extend, lemmy.ml.
That leaves lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, all the feddit.country, discuss.tchncs.de, sopuli.xyz, reddthat.com, lemmy.zip as neutral alternatives
The Lemmy devs operate lemmy.ml, but it’s far from being the most active one (it’s currently the 5th): lemmyverse.net/?order=active_day
Large instances admins? The most active communities are spread across dbzer0, lemmy.world, programming.dev, lemm.ee, feddit.de, etc.: lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active
The main difference of Lemmy compared to Reddit is the ability that communities have to walk away, as I explained in another comment: discuss.online/comment/5393546
I already posted to anotherserver/c/books and no one ever saw it.
Did you promote that community on !newcommunities and other promotion communities? Did you actively post on your new community, to attract users to your new one?
I’m going to take two examples I personally had
I’m not a fan of having all discussions on LW, so even if !movies was the most active one, we decided with a few others to start animating !moviesandtv. It is now the most active community on that topic.
I like the show “the Office”. !dundermifflin is the historical community, but as some people are not fans of lemmy.ml, we moved to !dundermifflin, which is now the most active community on this topic.
I guess that shows that community takeover is possible, and does not need additional tools, just some time and dedication.