I'm not sure catering to the opinions of random redditors is a useful approach, but that aside.

It was but a mere example

The Lemmy network and the Threadiverse at large being associated as just a Tankie hangout

Which would be solved by creating an instance (or building up an existing instance) that isn't the triad.

In this case Rimu (PieFed dev) and others were quick to jump in and steer, so hopefully this whole boycotting/cross-posting campaign at the very least gives them more fuel when these comments come up on the outside something like “Tankies are there, but they don’t have any important comms so you can just block those 3 instances or join [x] instance which blocks them for you”

Which would also be solved with the same solution.

It could help, but it's not a problem that any one solution is the solution. There's going to be some combination of solutions to actually solve it.

1 sounds like artificially inflating the numbers

Not really, I might have a lot of accounts, but it's still only 1 per instance so it's not really inflating the numbers. Besides most go by monthly active users for gauging the Threadiverse health which because of my pattern I might not even make up 1 MAU lol

2 isn't that useful IMO because without the actual content / ongoing engagement you just end up with multiple ghost communities.

I don't just make them, I do my best to actively contribute to them, like I said I also post "organically sourced" content and not just crossposts for this very reason

3 i think the imposter problem is a user education error and/or could be better solved in a different manner.

Um I'm not sure how that would be a user education error? I'm talking about someone maliciously making an imposter account and posting heinous crap "in their name" But there is currently no technical solution on the Threadiverse afaik for it

4 this is what cross-posting is for right (though I'll admit that experience is lacklustre right now)? You don't need a whole account to cross-post between communities.

Nah crossposts are a solution for a different problem, 4 is for when an instance hasn't federated with another instances remote comm yet and is therefore unknown to the instance

For example, I made this post to my comm at !gunnerkrigg@lemmy.cafe today from this toast.ooo instance I'm on rn

But toast.ooo never federated with that comm so as far as this instance knew !gunnerkrigg@lemmy.cafe didn't exist until I manually went to the comm by URL (toast.ooo/c/gunnerkrigg@lemmy.cafe) and subbed to it

Until then nobody on this instance would have been seeing posts from that comm in their c/all/new/whatever feed, even if a post went "viral". But now they will and for every other comm I sub to as I go

And that process happens a lot on these smaller instances I'm on, some will be missing even major comms like !pcgaming@lemmy.ca or !funny@sh.itjust.works

That's what I mean by helping interconnect smaller instances