An entirely acceptable answer to both my original question and my suggestion, although I had already attempted to address that. Every instance generating their own, seemingly non-random*, numbers for every post and comment was a big reason my mind skipped to “insanity” for my title - can we say “does not, SHOULD not, scale” any louder? Thanks again.
*
spoiler
Looking at the comment links in the OP cross-referenced with entries on lemmyverse.net, discuss.tchncs.de and lemmy.dbzer0.com have similar user numbers, both an order of magnitude larger(as large? anyways…) than jlai.lu … the reason jlai.lu’s comment numbers has got so high, about one-half instead of one-tenth as the user numbers might suggest, probably boils down to those users being subscribed to a large number of communities, but still not so many as the users of the other two servers. Run that up against the fact that there are fewer communities than users, anywhere, et viola!
That concludes this episode of my conjectural bullshit. Thanks for watching.
As usual when a comment like yours comes up, the feature already exists. In this case, its available only to instance admins.
A better suggestion would be to setup one’s own instance, but that’s not dismissive enough, it seems.