I have to disagree. Consolidation seems almost never to improved anything. Take Reddit, for example. I once found a sub called HikingAndCamping. Since I’m a hiker, I looked it over. The top mod only allowed discussions of hiking and camping on Mt Everest (or some equally nonsensical narrow topic). Since I actually wanted to discuss hiking and camping generally, I tried to create CampingAndHiking as a more accessible community. But that same top mod had already claimed that name as well under an alt. Reddit refused to do anything, but when they notified him that I had requested the dead sub (no posts and the alt hadn’t logged in for years), he jumped in and created a single “Go away” post. Then he sent me a private message to the effect of “I’m squatting to keep traffic flowing to my other sub. You want to talk about hiking and camping in general? Sucks to be you.”
Here, I’d just go to another instance and create the c/ that we wanted and move along. That’s part of the beauty of federation. Users can then join the one(s) that appeal to them and everyone gets to have their community.