At least the trolls make it obvious they’re not voting sincerely. Steam awards are a popularity contest where the categories don’t really matter, so I’m just glad less people will take the results seriously this time around.
This is still an issue with Lemmy though. Ultimately, one instance’s community is going to be “the” community for a given topic, most likely because it’s on a popular instance, and at a certain point it’s going to devolve the same way default subs did. People who wouldn’t join r/SeaWa probably aren’t going to join seattle@unpopular.domain with 50 active users, either. Personally, I’m more inclined to choose r/SeaWa over r/Seattle because it sounds less official.
This seems more like an aesthetic issue than a real problem, and don’t get me wrong, I’m all for getting the community name you want on a different instance, but I don’t think that’s grounds for “Lemmy will never become a circlejerk”.
Did you even use Reddit? It has more political communities than you could count. Just because there’s only one r/politics doesn’t mean that’s the only community you can choose from. Reddit has a lot of problems, but this is not one of them.
I believe this is usually covered by the fact that you can do just about anything you need to do over mail. I once ran into a government site that only worked on Edge.