Thanks - Yes, in a decentralised community it is to be expected that traffic will be dispersed among the newer arriving domains. It's similar to the way that new pages on a website receive more traffic than older ones. Google doesn't, as far as i know, accommodate for inter-related domains in the same way as it assigns domain authority as a partial result of the combined effects of each page under that domain. It might make sense from an SEO perspective for all Steem sites to point to steem.com or a similar site - except steem.com isn't really high quality enough for that.