Meta deliberately provokes that kind of stuff since rage baiting is good for engagement. They’ve cultivated and minmaxed that kind of behaviour for years. I’m sure it exists in small pockets here already, but nowhere near the same level.

Do you honestly think only the positive, friendly people would hop over? The entire fediverse will be overrun by crazy political conspiracy theories and hostile homophobic/transphobic/anti abortion stuff in no time.

Lemmy doesn’t need to be #1 in popularity. I’d prefer it to split and maintain a higher level of quality, even if it’s smaller as a result. Even if Meta can grab data either way, it should be disconnected on principle.

Separating the two sounds like it would make the problem a lot worse. Nobody would have a reason to create smaller duplicate communities anymore so things would end up centralised and easier to abuse, like what happened with Reddit. You could hop your account to a new instance, but doing so means nothing if there’s only one instance of the community.

I’m new to lemmy so I might be wrong on this, but say if we have one big community for a certain hobby/interest and the moderators get power trippy or there are other problems, people into that hobby essentially have nowhere to go right? Having lots of smaller places and subscribing to them all makes it easier to cut one out and be less reliant on a specific group of people.