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?
Yup, I have like four subscriptions to similar communities, and I’ll probably end up removing the ones I don’t like as much. Each community has a different feel and will appeal to different people. Also, if one instance goes down, I can fall back to another.
That said, this strategy probably increases load on my instance since now I’m getting content from multiple sources instead of just one, and there’s a fair amount of duplicate content.