In practice there’s a big one and unless there’s a big schism that fragments the community, the big community will suck the air out for any smaller community in any topic.

Worse if it actually worked as intended and each tiny community stayed fragmented forever and em never amounted to anything.

I question if it is by design to prevent the formation of true, fediverse wide, decentralized but coalesced community.

If it is by accident, then it is a huge missed opportunity.

But I don’t think it’s by accident. The protagonist of Lemmy is the instance owner and the moderator, not the user. So the important part of the network is the instance fiefdom, not the whole network. Instances should just be another mirror of the whole, instead of tiny dictatorships.