Oh yes absolutely, sorry I seemed to have skipped over saying that:-). Leaving behind sth like 80% of the userbase isn't an ideal plan, plus they don't even want growth over there, and are quite prickly about what they allow or not.

I saw comments advocating for the literal genocide of all people in the USA who did not vote, which far from being received negatively had tens of upvotes, yet did not trigger the mods for reasons of "be nice"? So I suppose to be there, outside of the established "in-crowd", a new user would have just a terrible time trying to figure out what they want vs. not.

So I definitely get why you would not want to host it there:-). I was just responding to why you didn't even consider it "Lemmy" - it at least halfway is not indeed, with its version so far behind and such, even though I can see those users as they comment on posts throughout the Fediverse (but not in communities on LW ofc:-).

For some reason I was thinking that were was a NY instance that I had considered. Perhaps Discuss.Online? But it's harder (for me) to use that map as it shows all the 1-person instances, and the much larger ones don't seem distinguished. So I ended up looking through all of them top instances one by one, and then went with Discuss.Online, though am not certain that I am remembering correctly about it being the one I saw that was in NY, vs. some other one.

Though how many other servers do we need to do that for? Would it matter if one was in West vs. East Germany, or France? (Spain might bc of Catalina:-P) Those distances in the USA are quite large though.