I agree that some kind of centralization is important to a good UX, at least for an entry point – centralization reduces cognitive load as someone is trying a new service out. But I disagree that this centralization needs to be at the server level.
Because people generally want a user experience similar to Reddit, I think it’s inevitable that most user activity will be concentrated in one or two instances.
Why wouldn’t a centralized, curated set of communities that span multiple servers work? This is basically the Lemmy Community Browser, although I think it could go one step farther to just have a button to subscribe to all of the top 50 communities.
Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit and are in direct competition with each other.
Why do you think this? My understanding is that Beehaw’s defederalization was communicated to be a temporary workaround for a lack of moderation tools needed to deal with spam from large open-registration servers – not competition. (I’m taking that post in good faith, which could be wrong.) Any other signs of competition?
I recommend reading Beehaw’s statement: https://beehaw.org/comment/263590
As it is just text on a screen, I think there are more and less generous ways to read the post. But I think a lack of scalable mod tools (to combat an internet-sized influx of “bad actors”) is a reasonable (and hopefully temporary) rationale for defederation.