When I joined, it was the only instance, but it was also useful that it was aggressively left-wing. Before Lemmy, all the Reddit alternatives were Nazi bars, because everyone that got banned from Reddit congealed there. The Lemmy devs/admins banned anyone on sight who hinted at Nazi apologia and I don’t think Lemmy would exist today, if they didn’t. But yeah, folks also assign way too much meaning to the instance. I don’t have to hold hands with my admins when I log onto lemmy.ml. I don’t have to agree with them. I barely interact with lemmy.ml users, because I just browse /all. And that generally looks the same as on other instances. It’s just a way to access the wider threadiverse. If the lemmy.ml server is down, I log into my alt account on another instance and the experience is virtually indistinguishable, I just don’t have my block lists there…