I still remember the one and only time I met a midwest.social user irl. I was part of the PSL delegation to a local coalition-building meeting. Someone had mentioned using fediverse-based sites to bypass censorship, we struck up a conversation after it was over. We both used Lemmy, he was on Midwest.Social. He asked "What instance do you use? Hexbear?". I told him, no, sorry, I'm in the PSL, I use Lemmygrad. I don't get to see posts on midwest.social because they defederate. Maybe you should talk to your admins about changing that. He got mildly uncomfortable, wrapped up the conversation and walked away. I imagine because he was confronted with the fact that those "Tankies" are not just Russian bots or (all) apathetic keyboard-warriors but do actually exist in the real world.