Part of the problem will be how to make new users understand this, though. Lots of people will be coming from something like reddit where they’ll just want to sign up through a popular instance and likely won’t fully understand what that means.

More advanced users will understand this, but it’s not then I would be worried about.

Oh, for sure. And that’s on the instance owner to understand how to mitigate, and it’s not cheap to do for instances with large amounts of traffic.

I’m very curious how this type of platform might perform under mass adoption. If it started getting anywhere close to reddit level traffic I’m sceptical how well the more popular instances would scale, and how the people that can currently afford to run them would be able to afford the infrastructure needed to keep up with millions of users.