In particular, it seems to me that centralization is almost a law of the universe (or at least a tendency). Lemmy may start decentralized, with dozens or hundreds of meaningfully-sized instances, but it’s easy to imagine a not-far future where most everyone has settled on just a handful of instances (or even just one).
I don’t mean to just be a pessimist here. I’m sure I’m far from the first person to wonder about this, and I’m curious whether there are ideas of how to counterbalance the tendency toward centralization.
while that is true, finding and joining new /c’s is klunky atm and not set up in a way that makes large growth likely
Definitely. As much as a centralized /c namespace is against all the principles of a decentralized system, lack of a centralized namespace results in topical duplication and hinders discovery. I don’t know how, but seems to me some sort of happy medium has to fall out.