Thanks for the reply! I have a few thoughts.

We typically dont close communities on programming.dev since then theres only one option for things

While multiple options have their advantages, they can also be a source of confusion, especially for new users. I don’t think that AutoHotKey has sufficient popularity (or controversy) to warrant more than one community at this time.

Ends up having things like people who use the community no longer being able to access the content and being difficult for the community to move off of it if something happens

Not sure I entirely understand. The original content would still be there, and the community could be reopened if the need arose. Would you be able to clarify what you mean?

e.g. beehaw.org is defederated from sh.itjust.works so any beehaw users wouldnt be able to use the community if the programming.dev one is closed

I’m not sure that I find this example particularly convincing, given Beehaw’s fairly aggressive approach to defederation (they defederated from lemmy.world). I assume that most Beehaw users either have alts on other instances or are comfortable with the fact that they are missing out on large portions of the fediverse. In any case, it doesn’t look like there has been any activity from Beehaw users on !ahk@programming.dev so far.

Taking the above into consideration, would you reconsider closing the community?

Of course, all of your concerns would be moot if we decide to consolidate to programming.dev, but we’ll need to see if @MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works is open to that.