I feel your pain about the squatted communities and agree that I wish there was a good laser cutting one. I know a lot of people are frustrated with the squatting so hopefully the lemmy.world admins implement some sort of community request.
What are your niche communities you are looking for? I got lucky that a bunch of mine are semi migrated (3dprinting, houseplants, ergomechboards, etc)
That’s the nice thing about the fediverse, you can have an account on one and participate in communities on both!
Yeah, I guess if you wanted to reduce waste you could supply it as logs that get cut off from? That way there is at least less plastic per piece