That’s the thing, if instance admins do that to avoid duplicate communities, won’t that just mean that a few huge instances will be the ones with most of the popular communities, and have outsized sway/traffic costs?

Then we’re back to square one and defeat the whole purpose of distributing load across many medium instances. Or am I misunderstanding how this works?

So if the ideal Lemmy structure is a large number of medium sized instances, would you say there should be a mechanism (either at the API level or handled by clients) to randomly select a general purpose instance at sign up?