Fediverse

id go a step further and say you need to draw a sub to a specific community. its hard moving users though when reddit actually attempts to prevent it by banning you for trying.

But wouldn't advertising one instance backfire and lead to huge server loads on that instance?

Blaze is doing precisely that - recommending lemm.ee, several initial communities to check out, the Voyager app, etc.

Edit: A major downside to recommending lemm.ee though is that it federates with literally all of the big 3. So someone can walk into e.g. [email protected] without knowing the first thing about what to expect there, followed promptly by leaving Lemmy altogether. Due to lemm.ee's approach of making everything "opt-out" rather than "opt-in" it takes quite a bit of catching up to understand things e.g. what "instances" are and how to block users from them (Pro-Tip: in either base Lemmy or Voyager, you literally cannot do it, though PieFed, Sync, or Connect each offer that capability). It's a bit like having an email account that offers no spam filtering!? Which is fine if that's what people want but doesn't seem geared for "mainstream" Redditors who want to come here "casually".

For those, if PieFed was a bit better developed in its UI it would be perfect. Lemmy.cafe also looks like a great option (Tesseract on dubvee.org too except I think it's only a single admin, and yet quite impressive nonetheless, though toxic people from Reddit would have a terrible & short-lived time there hehe:-P).