Just wanted to share a thread for those who don't regularly venture out of the bear site. Can't cross-post since it's defederated. It's small but has some numbers about community counts, active users, etc and links to more info from https://lemmyverse.net/. Thought it was notable that Hexbear shows up no matter how you sort it.
OP image is community count sorted by active users in the last month.
Edit: sorted by comments
Could just join a random small instance that don't block instances/comms on hexbear to continue being a fly-on-the-wall and access dunktank.
Spreadsheet of instances listing blocked instances and blocked by (BI and BB): https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances