no one being willing to talk to them so long as they’re on Threads will help convince them?

We won’t be, but there will be people on Threads (whether those people like it or not). There are ~2 billion Instagram “users”, and all Meta has to do is switch up how those two services integrate. The reason I think they didn’t do that yet is because all the tech companies are under monopolization scrutiny right now, so they’re not being as aggressive for the time being.

I’m hoping that Threads doesn’t take off, and microblog people don’t set up there in the first place (since Mastodon, and unfortunately Bluesky have momentum), but there’s a good chance it might. When that happens, we aren’t going to convince people to switch with an argument about audience size.

We picked Lemmy and Mastodon because it’s the better way to do social media, not because it had a bigger audience. That’s the strong argument that will convince some people to switch.