Thanks for all the comments and discussion - I can see that there's a number of factors at play right now that are adding to my confusion/concern:
We've lost our home, and we're early in a process trying to find a new one. Gradually over time we possibly gravitate towards a subset of communities in whatever instance that interests us (and it appears we can subscribe to communities in other instances, whilst remaining in whatever instance we want?! Awesome didn't know that)
a multi-reddit type feature (if it gets built?!) may help to combine communities across multiple instances into a single feed
this isn't unique to Lemmy - reddit has / had similar situations such as /r/tech and /r/technology
As the communities / instances mature, I think we're likely to start to see centralisation of communities gathering around a primary community.
It'll be really interesting to see this evolve over time!
Thanks for all the comments and discussion - I can see that there's a number of factors at play right now that are adding to my confusion/concern:
It'll be really interesting to see this evolve over time!