It makes sense that centralization around a specific instance can be touchy because a lot of us are refugees from another platform whose centralized administration ruined it. I’ll explain for each one of these I mentioned why I didn’t go for it.
I will not be trying to personally revive pawb.social, as I’m not a furry and have no interest in moderating a community whose unifying identity I do not and cannot relate to. That is, I’d want to help foster a community that I’d want to be a part of, which is one about Sonic rather than about how Sonic fits into the context of being a furry. I put that one in there just to address all of the ones I could possibly find. If someone does revive this community, though, I’d be happy to link it in the sidebar for the Lemmy.World one for those looking for that more specific kind of Sonic community.
As for lemm.ee, I decided against getting in contact with the admins and trying to work something out (I’m not unfamiliar with this, as I had to contact one of the administrators of Lemmy.World to work out the Sonic community since it had been previously deleted) predominantly because I felt the 500 kB image upload limit could be detrimental to those wanting to post fan art. That is, I thought it’d give users a better experience all while being easier to create on my home instance, making it a no-brainer to me.
Lastly, although you didn’t bring these ones up, I thought about asking to revive the SDF Sonic community, but I decided against this one just because of the name. I just really, really don’t like using underscores in community names where it’s not actually necessary. The .ml /c/sonic community just has nothing worth salvaging. And the .ml /c/metroid community has three posts that are all a few years old.
I don’t mind putting in the effort to contact moderators or administrators when I believe it will be in the best interest of the community. It’s just that for all of these, I felt like starting fresh on Lemmy.World was a better alternative (barring Sly, of course, who just strangely has nothing anywhere).