Having your identity being tied to an instance is not great UX imo. Bans happen, not always for great reasons. Instances die or close up shop. Having to re-do all your subscriptions, losing your comment history, etc just because your smaller instance closes is pretty annoying and pushes people to more stable, centralized, large instances.
This is why I prefer nostr over mastodon, it’s basically the same in every key way except that your identity is not tied to your instance. I believe nostr devs are working on a reddit clone like lemmy or kbin, but it’s not done yet. Their twitter/mastodon clone is great though.