Unlike NFTs, it’s actually used by ordinary people

Yeah, but i don’t recall every tech company shoving NFTs into every product ever whether it made sense or if people wanted it or not. Not so with AI. Like, pretty much every second or third tech article these days is “[Company] shoves AI somewhere else no one asked for”.

It’s being force-fed to people in a way blockchain and NFTs never were. All so it can gobble up training data.

If you use an instance just for yourself, it doesn’t actually decrease the load on the main servers in any way.

That’s not completely true. Yeah, it still loads another server a bit, but the server-to-server federation traffic is much more lightweight than the client-to-server traffic that would be involved with you having an account on that server and accessing it that way.

But yeah, multiple, equally-sized communities on different instances is the ideal situation. The only sticky part right now is FOMO because you’d have to constantly watch for new SelfHosted communities and join them. Hopefully some frontend tools come along soon to make joining/managing multiple communities like that more streamlined.