I can see that. Most normies (honestly, most people who aren’t “normies” either) right now are going to be fixated on large communities and will measure websites based on the number of active users. Gone are the days of low population independent forums. Users now want large social media silos with millions of people where they can have a one stop online location with hundreds of people at any given time who can answer their questions. Smaller communities that focus too heavily on quality over quantity have their own problems and can easily scare away new users by declaring all their rules.

The general rule of social media sites is that people are on them because other people are on them. Lemmy is going to have a hard enough time attracting new users because it’s not a “normie” site. (10 years ago it’s hard to say if Reddit would have fit that label.) Social media platforms can snowball.

I feel like the more a social media platform splits itself up, the harder it will be to attract users. Users don’t want to have to think about which instance they need to join in order to get access to the largest community.