I stopped starting to grow !photography@discuss.online because of that when I saw that !photography@lemmy.world was getting most of the posts.
Do you think there's a technical reason for this? I wouldn't expect this considering we have https://lemmy-federate.com/
Maybe it's just the UX of Lemmy-UI preferring local communities?
It would be interesting to see someone spin up an instance, no signups, just Lemmy-Federate. Check how much resources it uses up.
But for an instance that already has a lot of users it's going to be a drop in the bucket. Any large communities probably already have a real user following them, and any small communities won't have enough activity to cause significant load anyways.