Pretty straight question.
I see Lemm.ee is now the second most populated instance based on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, with 3634 monthly active users.
I also know that Lemmy devs said that
lemmy.ml is bigger than beehaw, and only costs 80 euros per month for a dedicated server.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/2372503
As lemmy.ml has 3561 monthly active users, should we consider that around 3,5k-4k users is the sweet spot for an instance population, and stop recommending the ones that reached that threshold?
The number is based on how many people are needed, not how many there are with such a skillset.
It is hilarious that you assume that there are not one in a thousand with such a skillset as spinning up a a small fediverse instance on a cloud host takes literally one afternoon and anyone that knows how to use a computer can learn the needed skills in less than a week.
But I can easily proof that there are enough people willing and able to do this, as right now there are more than enough small Lemmy instances online to take over all of the Lemmy.world users if each of them had about 1000 members. You can easily look it up yourself.
The problem is uninformed users like you that flock to the largest instances and thus actively repeat the same mistake they already did on Reddit.