I'm the head mod of a pretty big subreddit, /r/3Dprinting, with 7 million views a month and 1.8 million subscribers. At the beginning of this I set up a lemmy instance at https://rhombik.com and linked to it from that subreddit. From the roughly 150k uniques per day we had on /r/3Dprinting zero of them have tried the lemmy instance.
Perhaps setting up your own instance for a single community is the wrong approach. You're basically hosting an entire Reddit for a single subreddit. It probably hurts discoverability a bit.
There are already 3D printing communities on Lemmy.
Lemmy.ml wasn't accepting new users at the time. This server has 200GB of ram, plenty of space. I do also try to connect people to lemmy in general but it's challenging when the "main instance" isn't accepting new users.
The crux of the problem right here. Modding is ultimately a power trip, and no mod wants to give up their power. A "head mod" of a popular subreddit wouldn't just join a random lemmy where they can't assert their power.
I’m a mod for a 1.5mill sub community and I’d gladly drop it! The only thing I care about is the community being able to move somewhere where we can continue to have interesting discussions about the thing our sub is dedicated to. I could not care less about continuing to be a mod. I only do it at this point because the community is awesome and I still learn a ton there.
Speaking for myself here, I hate the Lemmy user interface.. do I really need lots of wasted screen space on the left and right sides of my screen? I also have issues with the expanded line spacing.. I have never liked reading text that is 1.5-3 spaced instead of single-spaced.. the colours they choose and the text size are also issues for me. I don't like white text on a grey background for example.
Lemmy as a user interface is not well designed. It wasn't made to be read on a web browser in a monitor. It was made to be read on a small smartphone screen.
I'm pretty active in r/3DPrinting and r/FixMyPrint, and strongly support the blackout. I've been avoiding Reddit entirely and getting my news from other sources, while also exploring the fediverse. I had no idea about the rhombik instance/magazine/whatever.
The core problem with the migration is that the information on where to go EXACTLY is hosted on the platform being boycotted. I decided to not visit Reddit anymore and watch for instances to pop up on the fediverse. If others do the same, the migration will be slow. Don't be discouraged if it takes a few days to pick up steam. There's another 3DPrinting magazine that has some users already. https://kbin.social/m/3dprinting@lemmy.world or https://lemmy.world/c/3dprinting
That leads to the second problem of on-boarding migrating users to a highly distributed platform. I've mentioned in the boycott server the need for "racks" (the subjects within instances are called magazines, this would be a collection). These would be moderated aggregators of instances, like the invisible step between lots of disparate subreddits. There would be no limit of the number of racks, so technically you could have a permutation of every associated magazine-instance combination. The purpose would be to have a single link new users can click on to get subscribed to a set of magazines all at once, basically making the federation concept seamless to less technical users while still highly flexible on the backend. I'm going to shoot the suggestion up the chain for kbin.
That leads to the third problem, which is all these alternatives are new and going through growing pains. Trying to add features comes second to keeping the service stable. I'm hoping others with more coding experience can assist kbin devs.
And I wanted to mention that last I heard (and saw evidence of), some of the main Lemmy devs were kinda garbage people (Tiananmen Square massacre supporters, not just questionable opinions on government). The more controversial instances have been defederated from the primary/intake server, but it's still worth mentioning. Kbin doesn't have that baggage, but there are only a couple devs, and really only one main dev, last I heard.
Kbin users can see and respond to Lemmy and Mastodon instances that are federated, so it has been the migration choice for most of the Reddit boycott groups.
edit: btw - I just looked at the comments on the one post. If you want to run a poll, fine, but most of the people protesting won't be there to vote. I thought the 3D printing subs were largely positive and supporting, if those comments represent the community I was supporting, I now have zero qualms about deleting my comments on Reddit.
So make of that what you will.