startrek.website was started during the exodus from former members of the startrek subreddits. All the communities (afaik) there are focused on startrek in some way. They post some great content.

The concept of 'wasted votes' in gerrymandering is when you can pack voters into specific districts based on voting demographics and population, to make it such that you can manipulate the outcomes of elections, or make districts that wouldn't be competitive based on the population, competitive for one specific party. Its a kind of efficiency measure of an election. It has a corollary in these threaded style communities, where if engagement isn't rewarded (be it upvoted, commented on, or submitted), the reward cycle doesn't happen and no additional content or engagement is created. In these communities the wasted vote concept applies because now engagement is spread out over redundant posts, comments, and lemmys. If you have two threads representing effectively the same thing at the same time, that could be considered a wasted vote, because now engagement is split.

And yes, I've been using sublemmys and communities interchangeably. I don't know that a common parlance has evolved yet. There have been a couple threads discussing this.

Overall the suggestions make sense for me. But it isn’t as trivial to solve, because of politics and policies. Maybe the startrek instance has great content, but does not allow hate speech. So “free speech” ultras might see demand for a startrek community on a “free speech” instance. Or hate speech is allowed, in which case the same scenario happens for everyone else.

I think this is a great point and I see why its warranted. There is another argument further down that's similar to yours.