With the sluggishness of the site these last few days you can sometimes get slowness or infinitely loading icon when hitting submit. If you aren’t sure if your post submitted, refresh the original page in a different tab before hitting submit again to see if it went through. I see double and triple posts in almost every comment section.
I agree that having many smaller instances which serve more distinct communities is by far the most pragmatic choice. The idea of communities distinct from instances is nice on paper, but it gives instance managers the impression a single instance can serve a wide-range of interests without incurring proportional overhead on the resources.
Lemmy is the closest thing we have to the evolution of reddit. So far it’s just a matter of handling the backend which was nearly always done by a well-resourced organization instead of individual volunteers. I think instances will naturally become more abundant, and specific to their purposes, and users will be able to distribute their accounts accordingly.