Sorry to hear, there are power tripping mods everywhere.
You can always try to escalate to the admins (even though sometimes they don't want to interfere with communities)
There are many communities that are similar on different instances, firefox for example.
Sometimes they are identical and should merge, sometimes due to the specific audience of the instance, it's better to keep them separate.
I wouldn't suggest merging !movies@lemmy.world and !movies@hexbear.net
Would be nice if lemmy supports something like multi Reddit with the option of hiding duplicate posts.
Mbin does support multireddits, but this doesn't seem to be interesting enough for people to switch to it (while Lemmy communities are fully accessible from Mbin)
Sopuli is currently 5 days behind LW: https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/cdfzs0dwal3pca/federation-health-time-behind?orgId=1&var-instance=lemmy.world&var-remote_instance=sopuli.xyz&var-remote_software=All&from=now-7d&to=now
Another reason to not centralize everything there
I see
encourage account migration to combat overcentralization
My gut feeling is that most of the people on LW are comfortable there, and wouldn't see the point in decentralization. That happened in the past with the removal of privacy communities, or the fact that LW is still federated with Threads, still they have 18k MAU
IIRC, Catodon development is currently halted (https://catodon.social/notes/9rl77swzw25jjq7x).
Sharkey I don't know
There really is a whole *keys forks lore ha ha