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?
Yes, absolutely. This not only limits fragmentation due to defederation, but would really help scaling as well. Having user servers lets those servers focus on being essentially caching servers, while limiting load on any community server.
I don’t want to host an instance but I think I could be compelled to host a caching server if such a thing existed.