The response to you being basically “Not small-small, just smaller,” is a great example of why people don’t want to leave established sites for this kinda fediverse nonsense.

“It doesn’t matter what instance you use!” Turns into, “Well, you chose the wrong instance,” when the one you went with went down for any reason. Maybe you chose one that was too big (or got too big after you chose it). Maybe you chose one that was too small. Maybe you chose one where the admin was just not committed to running it and gave up after some time. There’s a whole list of reasons why instances will have problems or fail or whatever.

Most people don’t want to play this game.