lemm.ee had a vote on threads. As to the short blocklist, it’s a combination of a liberal federation policy and sunaurus apparently taking the time to clean it up once in a while, other instances have instances on their blocklist which are long defunct.
hexbear avoided defederation by having admins who are more reasonable than (a not small chunk of) its users, lemmygrad is generally keeping to itself. It’s certainly not because Sunaurus, an Estonian, would have a soft spot for Russian imperialism. We’re also federated with beehaw, btw, as in they’re not blocking us.
I don’t know why we have so few communities, either. If we had more there very well might be more defederation drama going on because the more communities, the more chance for people to misbehave. movies is a quite harmless community in that regard, imagine !ukraine@sopuli.xyz while being federated with hexbear or lemmygrad.
I think lemm.ee is just… generic? It’s a place where you can have an account and see practically the whole fediverse, attracting a lot of people who just want to participate, not found communities. feddit.org has the whole German community plus the canonical Europe one, lemmy.ca is Canadian, programming.dev is very very techy, dbzero anarchist+pirate.