I work in a space adjacent to change management (ERP implementation) and honestly, be happy and kind. These questions are the absolute default ones of humans attempting to puzzle out a paradigm shift. And the fact they're here and they're feeling loved enough to actually ask for help with their new mental model of it is about eight degrees better than it could have been.

So my answer is: it's just like r/games, r/gaming, r/videogames, r/patientgamers. They are all the same subject matter with overlapping content and userbases, with potentially wildly different moderation biases and groupthinks. And that was all on one centralised Reddit! You subbed to some, or all of them, as you saw fit, you maybe even managed a multireddit to group them! It's just the same here except they're on different instances and soon, enhancements to Lemmy pending, will be just as seamless to manage.

I think it's just as simple as:

Most people want the decentralisation perk of not having a single profit driven company controlling everything, and that is where it ends.

Other than that, people would rather just have everything in one place where everyone is, but of course that is antithesis to the whole decentralised model.

People have gotten used to the convenience and ease of the silos, and people don't want that taken away.

I keep having this image of the owner of a small cottage who has gradually been making his cottage lovely, repairing bits, adding cozy furniture, hanging out with his friends playing his ukulele on the porch.

The huge apartment building down the road burns down, and he invites the huge crowd of refugees into his cottage for shelter. They immediately start complaining that his cottage is too small, it doesn’t have an elevator, how come there’s no exercise room, ewww there’s cat hair on this rocking chair, that color of pain sucks, how could you be so stupid as to have a slow cooker in your kitchen, we need to add on so tell your friends to get off the porch so we can turn it into a sexy new studio…..