If everyone was spread out onto different instances, and communities were based all over the fediverse, the decisions of one instance would be less impactful.
Let's put things in perspective. Lemmy.world currently has a "whopping" 127k users. That's fewer users than the moderately successful niche subreddit I created on Reddit has, which is just one of several thousand subreddits over 127k in size. Not to mention the tens of thousands of Instagram, youtube, facebook, tiktok, etc., pages with more than 127k subscribers. Saying lemmy.world has "a lot of power" at this point seems like a real stretch to me.
Their "power" would be relative to other lemmy instances, not absolute.
The comparison to reddit isn't really fair, as by the time they were getting thousands of subs with more than 127k subscribers, they had been bought by Conde Nast, and were also making money through ads.
These servers don't just magically run for free, someone is paying for it. And I don't know about you, but I don't want lemmy to change in order to appear more appealing to advertisers.
It's obvious that like mastodon when twitter imploded, not 1% of 1% of 1% of fleeing users actually made it past the registration screen. Maybe Lemmy will get another chance , in 5/10 years
A platform switch takes time, and normally it's a particular community that takes hold. Right now, on Lemmy, it seems to be mostly memes and shit posting that's on the front page. Getting more interesting conversations visible to new users will make the biggest difference.
Well we've been talking about one instance they blocked for like two days. This meme is part of the ongoing discussion around defed from the main piracy community on dbzer