I guess one will eventually “prevail” and become the defacto instance for that community
Fore niche-y communities, probably. For more generalized ones (like "gaming"), I can see several communities evolve in parallel, each with its own culture and preferred content.
Local transfer is a nice feature!
I'm playing on my Steam Deck like I was playing on my Switch 6 years ago. I prefer my indie games on handheld devices, so a good half of my playtime is spent on the Deck.
Well when you host your own website with your own funds, you try to not pay for unneeded perfs. But then a few hundreds people join, register, create content, upload images and videos, and suddenly your small VPS can't handle the load. And you're hesitant to scale up because it costs money, sometimes it costs time too because you need to migrate stuff, and maybe in a few days (or a few hours?) that load will disappear and now you're on a more expensive tier for nothing.
Less Google = better. The results are also better, and looking for stuff is a good part of my programming job.
Mastodon can have (has?) the same problem. This is somewhat solved with the self-verification process though, so it could be done similarly on Lemmy.