Quick notes for those who only know of Lemmy after the reddit API fiasco: from what I understand, reddit's banning of /r/chapotraphouse in mid-2020 is how Hexbear came to be (biggest instance prior to API drama, albeit unfederated at the time due to major software divergence) and the banning of /r/genzedong, /r/genzhao and /r/genzhukov in March 2022 brought a large exodus of users onto lemmygrad.ml, making it the most popular federated instance until the reddit API changes.