We started a regular fediverse instance because we wanted a space for queer and gender diverse folk to be safe, on something that wasn’t Mastodon or Mastodon derived.
Once we had that running, we spun up a lemmy instance just to check it out, and it sat there basically only used by me, until Reddit Day came along, and our userbase went from 3 to 3000 in the space of a week. So now, our lemmy instance serves the same purpose as our main instance, which is to provide a safe space for our community, but focused on lemmy/the threadiverse