listen, I'm willing to go to smaller instances if necessary, but for the same reason I signed up for mastodon.social - I want my local community to not be a desert, if at all possible.
really though, the UX here is not bad, there are some minor fixes needed but its already fairly close to reddit '00s (but a bit better) flow. I understand wanting your local instance to be busy entirely, but does it matter if it works just a bit more like reddit and you pop between servers and communities without ever thinking about it?