Did Reddit get massive because of Digg users making a beeline towards them or were they already big before that?
It’s not so much the instances but the communities that are important on Lemmy, unlike most of the fediverse. If your community’s instance is federated with the big instances, it helps get people to your community either way if the post shows as a link on the bigger instance or the host instance. Hopefully crawlers will eventually add some smarts so we link the host instances eventually too.