Otherwise, if we have a lot of medium sized instances but the most popular communities are hosted on just a few huge instances, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of distributing load across many instances?
If that’s the case, how do we solve the cumbersome user experience of having to subscribe to the same community over and over again across a ton of medium instances?
This stuff tends to come out in the wash. Yeah, there are duplicates, but that was true on reddit too. And just like on reddit, people will settle on one or two communities, and the people that don’t like those big communities will stick to the smaller niche ones.