Nah, it's more than that. It's a way of decentralizing power and becoming resistant to control.

It doesn't start or end with Lemmy - you could build Remmy, join it to the network, and somehow group up these communities and present them to the users as a single group. You could build Kenny because you're suspicious of the Lemmy devs, and help users migrate away from them (taking their content with them). You could make the server ad supported, make one for your students to speak amongst themselves semi privately, you could make one dedicated to LLMs

Hell, Reddit could decide to join the network and try to take it over, and each server owner could decide if they want to let them try or limit communication with them.

At the end of the day, you can only get so much control. Because while there are benefits to being on a specific server, ultimately anyone can spin up a new one and their users get access to a social network that includes all its members, and if instead of one animemes most users sub to 4 smaller ones, you again have less power in any one place

There's also the moderation aspect - no matter how good your tools, mods can only manage so much. Push past a certain point, and even with large teams you're going to get inconsistent moderation and a lot of resentment from it. But with smaller groups, mods can be closer to their members, and groups who don't want any moderation can have it their way - they just might be blocked from a server if the admin thinks they're going to ruin things

I mean, there's also already instances being blacklisted from the bigger Lemmy servers - they're not cut off from the network, but the instances don't talk directly to each other anymore.

And while we're very likely to see some consolidation, I think a lot of us would resist if the groups grew to rival front page subreddits.

I'd like to see science and technology go in that direction because I'll deal with flat earthers if it means I can see all the best takes from subject matter experts (and it's easy to tell the difference), but current events? Already I was on r/animetitties instead of the main news subs, because they have a very strong tendency towards polarization