More people should move their accounts off to smaller instances with less load. You can still interact with communities the same way, but have a user experience that is a lot better.
Yes and no. I have an account on a small instance, and trying to find and subscribe to communities is still annoying because I have to retry the search a few times from a browser to get the server to federate, and then it takes a while for posts to show up. The other account I have, on a big instance, can find everything, but I get more errors just trying to browse and vote.