I’ve been noticing a lot of back and forth between instances, changes of stances etc. I was wondering if there is any place that just collects what each instance represents from a philosophical perspective. This would be great in helping people choosing an instance before they join, or later if they want to switch to another instance.
I see your point with moderstion policy (hexbear etc.).
The aspect of local topics (aussie.zone), I see very critical for the fediverse. I see the same pattern here with the German-speaking communities on Lemmy. A huge part of them was historically hosted on feddit.de. The administrator of that instance lost interest in the project, downtimes soared and the instance is basically dead now. As an alternative, people founded feddit.org. Feddit.org is actively maintained right now but still the majority of the German content is focused on that instance. The communities AFAIK never grew again to the old size. If Feddit.org goes down as well one day (for whatever reason), I think chances are high that the German communities simply get lost as the frustratration grows everytime you start over again. Similarly, it would be a bad idea if every German was using the same German provider for their e-mails.
Personally, I’d prefer if Australian, German and every other ‘bubble’ (Solarpunk, Veganism, …) would be more distrubuted across various instances. That makes the fediverse more resistent against outside attacks, internal conflicts, downtimes and less dependent on single instance administrators.
The decentralization is good if you can get the numbers high enough for the individual communities to be useful, but having them concentrated creates a mini network effect, where each user is automatically exposed to all of the local communities, which would be harder to seek out and find individually. So I think there’s tradeoffs, and mostly-centralized and mostly-decentralized community-instance pairing both have pros and cons.