I always like there are basically two types of topics (because after all, communities are focused on a topic)
- either you have enough of a userbase to have your own flavour on the topic, for instance all the gaming communities that exist on different instances, which all co-exist next to each other, and it wouldn't really make sense to merge them all
- or you don't have enough people, and in this case you should just agree on one instance where to host the community and be done with it
I know there is the political aspect to take into account, but for me that comes back to the first point: if enough people of the same political side want to talk about something between them, that's good. If not, they might have to put that aside and go for the second option.
All that said, I think a lot of communities probably should be looking at negotiating a merge.
Strong agree
40k of us literally left Reddit to come here due to malevolent actions from Reddit.
Do all people interested in gaming see the discussions happening at hexbear and beehaw on those topics? The meta form seems to deny that there is a reasons why different communities exist on the same topic.