Totally disagree, the more tech savvy can spin up their own single used instances if they want, be fully in control of their own content and participate just like anyone on any large instance bar being defederated. All for basically free

Because people generally want a user experience similar to Reddit

The power Reddit has over these users is they believe that to be what they want. But have you ever run into a longtime Redditor who says it's perfect the way it is? Not just recently, either.

It would be more beneficial if ppl registered in small instances, right? Since it has better traffic than instances that are overloaded and also enjoy the same content

I mean, my first instinct was “how can I monetize this”

I agree that some kind of centralization is important to a good UX, at least for an entry point – centralization reduces cognitive load as someone is trying a new service out. But I disagree that this centralization needs to be at the server level.

Because people generally want a user experience similar to Reddit, I think it’s inevitable that most user activity will be concentrated in one or two instances.

Why wouldn’t a centralized, curated set of communities that span multiple servers work? This is basically the Lemmy Community Browser, although I think it could go one step farther to just have a button to subscribe to all of the top 50 communities.

Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit and are in direct competition with each other.

Why do you think this? My understanding is that Beehaw’s defederalization was communicated to be a temporary workaround for a lack of moderation tools needed to deal with spam from large open-registration servers – not competition. (I’m taking that post in good faith, which could be wrong.) Any other signs of competition?