Another way of looking at it: Lemmy is retaining the engagement of the vast majority of new users who have joined recently.

Sure, I have no love of Meta either, which is why I would love for people to have an easy escape hatch via the Fediverse…

You probably aren’t wrong about it being overly idealistic and optimistic. :-(

That’s an interesting point, one of the reasons I chose lemmy.world was that it wasn’t ban-happy.

Since writing my comment above, I’ve come across Cory Doctrow’s “Let the Platforms Burn” article where he argues that interoperability and the ability for users to move to other platforms is the best way out of the Meta situation. https://doctorow.medium.com/let-the-platforms-burn-6fb3e6c0d980

(Apparently) Unpopular Opinion: I think defederating Threads is the wrong move, because it just locks people into Threads. If people on Twitter had the ability to move to Mastodon AND still interact with all the people they did before, I think we would have seen even more people move. The only reason I still check twitter at all is because I have a few close friends who didn’t move. Meta is likely going to have big adoption of people who aren’t ready to go to Mastodon, but are interested in getting out of the dumpster-on-fire that twitter seems to continue to be. But blocking those people from being able to join the more popular Lemmy instances, given no actual policy violations, just will keep people in Meta that otherwise could leave. With the “however” being: It’s not quite clear to me that Threads users will be interacting with Lemmy as much Mastodon, if Threads were a Reddit replacement, it’s more directly connected.