So. Early, early on I did reach out to a couple of them.

Unfortunately, there are some frankly terrible communities on Lemmy who engage in some pretty awful hatred and historical denialism, and they weren’t interested in moving to a community that wouldn’t dissociate with that, much less one that is actively run by the same people.

And like, we can repeat to the end of time that Lemmy is a distributed community and each instance’s choices don’t reflect on others. But the reality is that people do look at the largest instances not shutting that crap out, and it does color their perceptions.