I don’t plan to use reddit anymore if I can help it, other than to find specific answers to things. I’ll no longer just browse. That said, up until now I exclusively used RiF. I refuse to touch the official app, and use old.reddit and ad blockers.
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.
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.