Probably a very polarizing question.
On the one hand, having most of the users and communities on LW causes technical issues (see this post), and also gives the LW staff too much power over Lemmy as a whole.
On the other hand, with 18k MAU on LW out of 47k (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/), every community listed there has a much higher chance of visibility compared to an alternative hosted on another instance
History of LW controversial decisions
- when they promoted Discord as an official communication channel (https://lemmy.world/post/3478399 - since then they created a Matrix chat)
- when they blocked the piracy communities (https://lemmy.world/post/13320356 )
- when they announced they might move from Lemmy to Sublinks (some comments from LW admins were quite controversial: https://lemmy.world/post/13899357 )
- when they forced the media bias fact checker bot and discarded user feedback (https://lemmy.world/post/18775630 - to be fair, they since then removed it from !news@lemmy.world , it’s still in !politics@lemmy.world )
- when they realized centralization of communities on LW was impacting the ability of other instances to stay up to date (https://lemmy.world/post/13967373 )
- when they updated their rules following a power trip overtake of a community (https://feddit.org/post/2308651 )
If the software you’re migrating to is built to allow that to happen, it’s absolutely possible. In the microblogging side of the fedi migrating between software isn’t uncommon, though in nearly all cases they’re forks from the same “family tree” so things work out mostly due to that, (Misskey is infamous for having a LOT of forks with most being capable of migrating to most, Mastodon can migrate to/from it’s forks Glitch-soc/Chuckya/Hometown, and Pleroma and Akkoma can migrate between each other…).
There are software being built from-scratch to be migratable from other software (aside from Sublinks, Iceshrimp.NET comes to mind as a total rewrite of Iceshrimp, which started out as a fork of Firefish and therefore is in the Misskey family tree, but found the existing codebase to be un-salvagable) but it’s definitely a rare case.
Seems like at some point they wanted a fork for every letter of the alphabet ha ha
I mean, there’s only so much you can do when your upstream is developed exclusively in Japanese (to the point the code comments are also in Japanese) with a focus on adding Reversi and a Suika Game clone into the software instead of refactoring so the same piece of code isn’t duplicated in 10 different files split across the frontend and the backend and refuses to implement editing because they find it too hard when both major fork families (Firefish/Iceshrimp and Sharkey) have it and it works fine enough (alt text edits don’t federate, but that’s comparatively rare)