what benefit would having a federated version bring?
I think that is one use case that I wouldn't want to see the service split up. It's strength is that all the data is in one place and little fragments wont vanish id instances go down
Been a user for nearly 10 years?
I do see the problem that a valuable set of global data is ultimately held by a US-American organization. I do know regional subsidiaries exist and in the case of Europe often seem to be run by public organizations, so that offsets this problem. I also wouldn't know how federation would work with something like inaturalist. Maybe keep instances of regional data? I could see a use case there.
There is a "iNaturalist network", not sure if that counts https://www.inaturalist.org/sites/network
