I thought there was another technical reason besides that - perhaps the list of what communities exist across the Fediverse comes from there? I don't mean like a traditional post but something internal (tbh I don't really fully know what I'm talking about here, just "something" that if Lemmy.ml were defederated from, instance admins would have to build other means to retrieve. Which likely isn't all that hard.)

Is also the only general instance of note to do so, I love it for it, but it doesn't make enough of a statement to the outside rep of the Threadiverse to make a damn for growth purposes. And I don't think the admin of .cafe has the resources to scale either, not like .world does so it's not like we can just massively dump newcomers to it either

that user is an ardent supporter/defender of the Triad lol

Oh, makes sense - I did not look into it.

I frequently tell people looking for "leftist" instances to go to dbzero or slrpnk, those are genuinely awesome, as well as legit. But lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and midwest.social, I dislike the disingenuous nature. Once someone starts off a conversation with a lie, you cannot trust anything else that follows. So they must think that we are absolute idiots that will literally never catch on, ever? Which tbf... they are probably right, in the sense of the common herd anyway, who does not pay attention to much outside of their narrow scope of interest.

What next bothers me then is that when people DO catch on, they then want to leave the Threadiverse, or else not join in the first place, so it's actively harmful. Although... what are you going to do about it? Indeed. For myself I placed my hopes in PieFed, and this last month has seen the first-fruits of that as so many communities chose to migrate here rather than still yet another Lemmy server. PieFed literally is not even fully finished being developed - e.g. there is no post preview option (there strangely is one for comments like this one that I am typing out here, but not first-level responses to a post, and not actual posts - although in the past I have seen those buttons, yet right now they are gone in those cases) - but people STILL chose it, over Lemmy.

And I am sure that you are well aware of the post from like a year ago on Lemmy.World that more than subtly hinted that they were ready to jump ship to Sublinks, when it became developed enough. Sadly it never did (the developer had a baby, and still excellently runs Discuss.Online but has no extra time to get it finished, so I sympathize:-D), but the desire for such remains very real.

And you are doing your part to help, so kudos for that!:-)