Not really. A few years ago Lemmy was primarily based out of the dev's servers, and then like beehaw and hexbear. So you could have struck that claim in like spring of 2023.
They were sort of the original instances that didn't require an application to join. So a lot of communities started there.
But then the reddit API stuff happened and Lemmy exploded, relatively speaking. A whole slew of instances started up, and a whole lot of people entered the picture.
And, uh, the culture of Lemmy changed to say the least.
The extensive attention to curation, editing, and deleting was the whole point of the manufactured reality being pushed.