It feels like they’re two different roles. It might be better to have user-orientated servers that prioritise federation of content and only have a couple of meta-style communities, and other servers which prioritise being the go-to place for discussion on a particular topic and less a place that manages a large number of user accounts.

It just seems like two really distinct roles all servers are trying to do at the same time, and it’s leading to larger sites with a lot of users duplicating all the same subs, rather than there being any particular spot for certain types of discussion.

It also means the server hosting a particular type of discussion might defed certain instances to prevent trolling when it’s a sensitive topic, but it wouldn’t affect a large userbase who have that as their home server, it would only be moderating the discussion for the content areas they specialise in.

Thoughts?