Yeah, I think it has a certain charm. However I fully agree, without it being addressed this will lead to issues and setbacks in the future trying to build communities. For now I'm subbing to all and trusting the process that creases will eventually iron themselves.

I think, kept this way, instances should be more clear what kind of 'country' they want to form. For example a group that has tech as the primary interest, should go about starting the instance as such, and setting ground rules for communities therein. Tech related, even if loosely, and differentiated from the masses. Or a better example would be, a European - English Instance could require a suffix like EU or UK like newsUK or photographyUK simply to attract the more locally relevant audiences.

A more involved solution could be to tag your community like Twitter into topics it wants to show up in feeds for (as well as tags that exclude it).. like 'technews' tagged in the 'news' and 'technology' but excluded from 'politics' and 'finance' and 'onion'

Another one could be to allow communities to federate with one another. If a news community spots some large news audiences in other instances, the moderators for each community could federate with one another and create a supercommunity (like a multi on Reddit), allowing the super to operate on both instances but share hosting of something along those lines.

You could also have moderators agree to join forces by migrating one community over to the larger server and closing up shop. This may happen naturally with time.

It's not necessarily a bad thing, but especially with the amount of news users (and subs) migrating from Reddit there is a certain potential for chaos for sure.

However, for me the pros of this approach still outweigh the cons as, like you said, it also provides more choice with which community you want to interact.

Like chess, but are a bit tired of googling en passant? Just find a community, that is more focused on the game on a different instance.