Not many people had their own website in the late 90s

Your post is pretty nonsensical anyway, but if anything more people had their own websites as a proportion of the web, with Geocities and Angelfire etc. This was before social media, so to have a presence on the web you had to have your own site, and people did.

Sure, it’s counterintuitive, but so is not bracketing things in ternary operations.

This would be especially great if apps like Jerboa allowed automating the grouping process (opt in by user maybe). Some sort of maintained lists of equivalent communities across instances, so the app can easily allow you to subscribe to one community or, in a more Reddity way, a federated set of communities with one tap.