I came over from Reddit right after Apollo shut down on June 30, and TBH, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stay after that first week. I was seeing the same posts each day no matter how I sorted, and barely any of the posts had any interaction. I’ve seen a huge jump in quality posts and conversation in the last 2-3 days for some reason, and I’ve been popping over to Reddit less just to have something to browse. I’m hopeful that it keeps getting better from here.
I ran into the same issue with Lemmy.World. Tried switching to Beehaw.org first (before I learned that they had defederated from some of the bigger instances) and had my “application” rejected. Appears I didn’t provide good enough reasons for why I wanted to join their particular instance. To me, it just shouldn’t be that serious. Tried sh.it just.works and well, it works!
I agree, if you’re going to do it, it needs to be 3-4 times that size at least