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?
It’s the same as the Internet. You have lots of websites that cover the same topic. The main difference is that lemmy defines a standard the different sites can follow to communicate with each other in a consistent way