The downside to individual servers, and micro-communities, is the cost and maintenance of lemmy instance. Its more scalable, reliable and cheaper to have a bunch of relatively low-churn communities exist on one bigger instance.
The upside is that the rust community gets to own its own data. If programming.dev decides to shut down tomorrow, and posts and comments made there are gone. Lemmy doesn’t mirror or cache… all that data lives solely on the server ran by somebody.
I’d vote lemmyrs at least for now until a governance and stability model is figured out to ensure these conversations don’t go into /dev/null like /r/rust (sort of) did.
If say the Linux Foundation or a similarly large open source foundation (Apache, FSF, OSI, etc) decided to host a larger “open source” server, I’d consider moving there to improve discoverability and lessen the burden on the rust community itself
Oh I’m not saying what your doing over at programming.dev is wrong or insufficient… Honestly I don’t know what your doing to ensure the lemmy server exists long term (though its great to hear you’ve got some policies in place already).
I’m more thinking the rust community should evaluate options and vote, or some rust subgroup of the leadership should set criteria to ensure that another reddit-type event doesn’t happen again (the home of this community must be open-source, with data backups publicly available, with a governing body and a line of succession or something, etc).
If programming.dev meets those things today, I’d say sure lets move there. I think its better to have a lemmy instance for a concept (computer science) than a specific topic (rust), but that’s just me