I never argued of growing for the sake of it. Just go to the second or third page of communities on lemm.ee:
https://lemm.ee/communities?listingType=Local&page=3
They need more content. You need users for content. So the goal I have in mind is to grow for the sake of having vibrant communities for everyone.
My personal opinion is that I think large instances should "take one for the team" and suffer through federation with threads, at least in the beginning.
It's no secret that the fediverse still has a (shrinking) content gap with the centralized alternatives. Exposing potential users to our content is really the only way to get a critical mass of users. While there has been an explosion of content, a quick perusal of niche communities demonstrates that we have not yet reached the critical point.
So ultimately, I think that at least one of the large instances, i.e. lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, or Lemm.ee, should be tasked to suffer for the greater community, for a while.
You can host your media elsewhere and hotlink it here!
I agree there is already a great community here, but I definitely see smaller communitues in need of users
I also agree that Facebook and their products are not an.... Ideal... path, to be as polite as possible.
But I still hold that at least one of the major instance should remain open to threads, for at least a short while, for the potential benefit to Lemmy at large.
Also it should be said that Lemmy has so far held great momentum, and so I'm not particularly worried about defederating from Facebook derailing the momentum.
Regarding an influx toxicity, here I have no rebuttal. Look at the state of Lemmy right now, the two of us have different opinions and are managing to have a legitimate conversation. I can't think of another place online where I'd expect to see that.