Technology

I mean, people will naturally flock to the biggest instances.

But if you have even 100 ACTIVE users, they'll "discover" the vast majority of communities for you, after you manually search the most popular communities.

Reddit isn't totally free of this problem (feature) either--You can have multiple subreddits dedicated to the same topic.

IMO while the federated communities might feel fragmented if you are used to reddit, it's the main benefit of using Lemmy and something that should be embraced. Concentrating content into only a few instances defeats the point of federation.

Take the current issue as an example: A gigantic community defederated from another gigantic community leading to a comparatively large wall between the content of those communities. Had they been smaller, the impact of this issue would therefore also be smaller. This affects other communities which get content from beehaw as well, since there's now less interaction between a large portion of the fediverse user base.

It's only natural that large communities will bubble to the top however, and there probably isn't a good answer to how to 'balance out' those communities, or if that's even beneficial at all.

Because people generally want a user experience similar to Reddit

The power Reddit has over these users is they believe that to be what they want. But have you ever run into a longtime Redditor who says it's perfect the way it is? Not just recently, either.

Totally disagree, the more tech savvy can spin up their own single used instances if they want, be fully in control of their own content and participate just like anyone on any large instance bar being defederated. All for basically free

I mean, my first instinct was “how can I monetize this”

It would be more beneficial if ppl registered in small instances, right? Since it has better traffic than instances that are overloaded and also enjoy the same content