One of the things I have been hoping for (down the road) is integration between (among) instances using a common API. This would allow users to see all their communities – the ones on codidact.com and the ones on programmers.co.uk and the ones on fan-communities.com and so on – in a single site list. This list would be grouped by instance, so it’d be really clear when you’re on whose, which matters because instances might have different policies. If we do things right with the API, we could even support navigating to/from TopAnswers communities this way.
I said the list would be grouped by instance, but for instances hosted by the same organization with the same rules, we would include an option to mingle the communities from the instances involved. This means that to the user, our replacement for SO would be just another community on our list, even though at the back end it’s a different instance.
By taking this approach, we gain the simplicity of a single instance for a bunch of smaller communities while preserving our ability to expand. I think of this as just-in-time federation; don’t do a lot of separation now that we don’t need, but keep the door open by planning for expansion now.
Tagging @Marc.2377 and @ArtOfCode to make sure they see this, because we haven’t discussed it yet.