Kind of weird but suit themselves I guess

How come?

I feel like it is just a matter of time before either:

1. The fragmented communities develop more and become distinct, so that they are more unique and shouldn’t merge.
2. One of the communities becomes the more popular “default” option, and the other becomes less active as people gather in the more popular one.

Even if that doesn’t happen, redundancy isn’t bad. We’ve seen how hard it is to migrate when there’s only 1 real option and that option disappears or goes bad for some reason (i.e. reddit). If there was another fairly active community with the same focus, that would make it easier to keep going. That’s part of why decentralization is good.

This is a non issue. Different communities and instances have different rules, norms, cultures etc. There’s no need to smash everyone together in a monoculture.

Exactly. This is a non issue and actually a feature.

I mean, just set the limit to a ridiculously high number then? I’m not aware that Lemmy has any in-built limits, but I could be wrong.

I believe that Mastodon instances with limits only link to external posts that exceed the limit, they don’t display the whole post.

Of course you can always run into network limits if you get huge posts, but that applies to everything and doesn’t have anything in particular to do with Mastodon.

Isn’t character limits an instance setting?