Now, if, instead, you have everyone self hosting their own server, you go right back to having everyone sending a ton of requests to small servers, thereby overwhelming them

It seems like this is based on the assumption that each instance hosts the entirety of lemmy, but that is not the case, they only host the communities their users are interested in.

Is this a hypothetical issue or is there evidence of a scalability bottleneck?

Dont let developers dictate the content of the homepage.

I get the sentiment, but who is going to do it? just as the developers are donating their time, there will need to be community minded folks doing the same.

Lemmy doesn’t have a marketing budget to spend on a community manager.

There are a couple issues open on join-lemmy’s github - https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/issues, but not a lot in the way of contributing to fix it.

I mean, I get for a lot of people it’s not user friendly, but ultimately Lemmy is not some start up that has to grab a market share quick. If no one contributes better documentation, perhaps there won’t be a high enough adoption rate, but that’s ok for Lemmy.

afaik the subscribe pending is simply a visual bug as noted here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2685

each comment will have two links above it, the first (chain icon) is a link to the comment on the instance you are on, the second (colorful star) is a link to the comment on the remote instance which you wont be logged in to.

For example here is your comment on lemmy.word in the Technology@beehaw.org community:

https://lemmy.world/comment/152987