What I mean is, why not just a bi-directional mirror, with several servers in the larger users goes? Can the federation API be leveraged to just do that to address the dramatic load increase? Folks firing up Lemmy servers all over that only have a tiny portion of unique content are likely to provide poor experiences and stress the federation subsystem on the larger lemmy.world and lemmy.ml sites.
A lot of the value isn’t technical, it’s social. Each instance can set their own rules for acceptable conduct and what sort of content they want or don’t want. That’s one of the most valuable parts of decentralization, an instance like Beehaw can try to be an open and inclusive space and thus have a longer list of rules, while another instance can be more permissive and allow NSFW and more offensive speech. And thus the two can coexist in the same network with the same namespace.