When you look at https://beehaw.org/communities, you can see that there are only a few communities, but they are diverse enough to cover most of the topics you would have to discuss on the Internet....
lemdro.id is a specialized instance, not a general one. !android was also created and popularized by the lemdro.id team, but when they decided to move to a dedicated instance, LW admins just installed their own moderators to that community. Also, there are more: !android, !android
Basically any community on LW will have an equivalent community somewhere else. Because even if people don't plan long term to stay on LW, they will use it as a cheat code to grow and then move somewhere else. And then LW admins just takes over the old communities.
I'm not sure how either side would agree to "merge", since wanting self-governance was the reason the split happened in the first place.
I see where they come from, but from a new user perspective, it's quite confusing to see too similar-looking communities, more or less similarly active, with more or less the same type of content, and not know where to post
!android is more software development oriented, and !android has the typical lemmy.ml spin to it.
I’m not sure how either side would agree to “merge”, since wanting self-governance was the reason the split happened in the first place.
Indeed, but on that point I'm not sure how the LW is currently moderated. The moderators don't seem that active (it's a trend I've noticed among a few LW communities). If I have some time in the coming days, I might contact them to see if they are still interested in managing that community, or if uniting forces with lemdro.id would make more sense
Beehaw's number of communities, and why it makes sense
When you look at https://beehaw.org/communities, you can see that there are only a few communities, but they are diverse enough to cover most of the topics you would have to discuss on the Internet....