There is actually an advantage to being part of a larger instance if you want to browse everything, actually. An instance is federated with another when a user from Instance A subscribes to a community from Instance B. The more users in an instance, the more people to subscribe to other instances, federating that instance with more instances for all users.
I’m not on an instance with no downvotes, as I do think they have SOME purpose (though you’re right that it is usually a bit of a disagree button rather than anything else), but I agree with the rest. The content here is certainly slower. On reddit, I could just refresh the main page and have dozens of new posts to interact with- here, not so much. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, though. I still get my mindless scrolling when I’m poopin or something like that, but I’m spending a lot less time online than I did. I’m reading more, I’m working on my novels, I’m WAY more productive at work. I used RiF exclusively on my phone, and so I decided pretty soon after the API announcement that I was done. All the protest and reddit’s hilariously mismanaged response has done has cemented my resolve.
The only reason federation wasn’t working was because they had to turn on CloudFlare protection just to keep the site from crashing. That interfered with federation. Assuming they’re able to upgrade enough to handle the traffic, they’ll federate as easily as lemmy does.
He even claims that around a thousand subreddits went dark. It was 8,000. Hundreds are already pledging to stay dark indefinitely, including huge ones like r/aww and r/videos.
Every new account isn’t a bot, though. We don’t have real numbers to work with yet.