I feel like having many communities works well on large platforms, but on smaller ones it fragments the already limited content, which in turn makes most communities inactive and reduces engagement.
I feel like having many communities works well on large platforms, but on smaller ones it fragments the already limited content, which in turn makes most communities inactive and reduces engagement.
My #1 guess is that it just wasn’t thought out terribly well. It looks a lot like it was meant to be “Reddit, but with federation”. With that mindset, just having each instance be its own minireddit with its own equivalent of subreddits is pretty intuitive, but it turns out to be really clunky once it’s working. (Hard to find communities and content, dozen different but identically named communities, weird federation behavior)
This being said, nothing’s stopping people from making general/chat/hangout communities, it just takes a lot of work to make a place active and discoverable enough, especially since activity is generally low across the board anyway.