So, as per images below, when you search for an Australian community associated with lemmy, lemmy.world is more likely to come up than Aussie Zone in all i've tried, bar Melbourne our most active community.
My question: Is this a problem we should consider intentional action to correct? And if so what could we do?
Yeah, we're aware of that issue. It's a limitation with the Lemmy software itself. It only synchronises one thing (comment/vote/post etc) at a time. Confirms it federated and then the next thing. Due to the physical distance between us in Australia and lemmy.world in Finland, each thing takes ~.25 seconds to federate. As there are more things to federate than there is minutes in the day, there is a backlog.
Out friends over the Tasman got around the problem by spinning up a proxy server in Finland just to grab batches of lemmy.world content and bulk transfer it to NZ. We've been invited to share the code that enables that process, but it requires us setting up our own extra host in Finland. We haven't allotted the time and funds to do that - mostly as it's a problem that is expected to correct itself in an upcoming version of the Lemmy backend software.