why aren't the posts for each community replicated across instances?
or maybe at least the posts wouldn't be replicated, but there would only be one community, and when you visit it, posts for the community are downloaded from your primary instance, as well as other instances based on some configuration that makes sense.
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Because those are all different communities with different moderators. Think of the "subreddit" name as the full name of the community AND server.
Likely what will happen is one of them will "win out" with amount of activity. But here is the good news. If the moderators get on a power trip or things go south, everyone just switches to another one.
Since email is the common analogy, I would extend that to say that you could be John.Smith@gmail. You might also have John.Smith@outlook. Someone else has John.Smith@yahoo. If you wanted, you could setup a new account John.smith@protonmail, or start your own server and be me@JohnSmith.com
Communities are the same way.
good point with being able to switch to another if a mod goes haywire. but i think that there just shouldn't be any mods -- or rather, the community members should moderate themselves via some algorithm that uses votes, discussion, etc. to hide/remove posts. you could choose to view a hidden post that has been downvoted a lot if you want.
to clarify, "admin of an instance" is different from "moderator of a community".