I'm going to disagree. Lemmy as a whole is 60k people as of 3 months ago. There's probably little tiny packets of closed instances of a small group of friends, but there aren't enough of those closed groups to even register on a count. Meaning there's probably less than 100 people, collectively, in those small instances.

And how is that anything that disproves the "niche" title? 8 Billion people on earth, 100 people or less fit into the catagory you describe. Hell, even all of Lemmy at 60k still would be classified as niche.

As for the nazi instances, I don't see that. And I don't mean I'm not federated with them. I mean, they don't exist. Those types of people like to make noise. They like the idea of being offensive. They go where the people are. I'd say bluesky is too small for them, much less lemmy.

10 years ago twitter was considered left wing leaning. It's also where the people were.

Now, we have a new twitter owner, and it's a nazi hangout. It was attractive to nazis, because nazis could be seen there.

They can't be seen on public lemmy instances, because this place is a ghost town, and losing users by the month.

Whereas twitter is NOW losing users, but at their peak it was like 700 million users. Now it's at 250 million as of a few months ago.

So one post on twitter by a nazi will still be seen by more left leaning people who haven't left yet, than 20 messages on lemmy. Even if they somehow DON'T get moderated.