yea i think one huge advantage is that theres no specific tos for lemmy as a whole and each instance can just do whatever they want which helps loads when it comes to censorship and moderation, and theres no 1 entity that can just skeet yo off the entire platform if u break some rule (great example is how reddit seems to be silencing ppl promoting lemmy and discussions ab it)

I might try install an instance on my website and try to make a merge function

Awesome! I'm trying to get my feet wet with contributing as well. I don't know Rust or Psql very well (although I am an experienced MySQL/MariaDB admin) so it's gonna take a while for me to catch up enough to be useful. I'm trying though :P

Regarding your last paragraph, I agree. I'm subscribed to gaming in lemmy.ml and beehaw so see the same content twice regularly. Duplicate communities raise other concerns for me though:

Which one is the defacto community to join? Using the Gaming community as an example, maybe one leans more to images and the other has more meaty discussion threads just by way of who has joined those communities - nothing to do with the rules. But if you subscribe to both, the majority of the content may be duplicate posts instead? It's not clear from the community title alone.

Is the potential squandered as communities are potentially splintered? Maybe people just stick to one community without joining the other. It'll take time for a certain community to establish itself as the main community with the highest quality posts, but due to the volume of users on the main instances maybe there won't be a main community? Or maybe people won't even be aware of multiple communities for the same topic as the names are different, e.g. football Vs soccer.