A lot of this is purely teething issues related to (1) the fact federation seems difficult to understand to some people and (2) the fact it’s early and people keep thinking “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if there was a WORLD NEWS forum?” and they create it without realizing that actually a ton of other people have already created one.

It’s not like Reddit didn’t have a ton of duplicate or overlapping subs.

Maybe it should be easier to merge subs and instance admins could maybe encourage it if there’s no obvious reason why they have a sub that’s clearly a duplicate of one on another server.