Thanks! Having the communities be decentralized was a deliberate decision from early on. Andrew wanted to go in that direction and to me made perfect sense so we never even stopped to talk about it much.
In practice there are two simple considerations that make it a no brainer for us:
- eventually your communities will be decentralized / independent whether you like it or not (eg today there are plenty of python sub-communities depending on whether you use python for webdev, data science, devops, etc)
- a central community hub means that you need to spend money and communication budget on a team of moderators. given how the ZSF financial strategy, we have to stay small if we want to succeed, so that means giving up things like having a moderation team.