Honestly it’ll probably be closer to 99.999% of users will stick around Reddit. The largest Lemmy instance is smaller than the smallest subreddit I follow and I suspect that’s probably the case for most people.

Here’s what will happen… Reddit blackout starts, people come to Lemmy, 8 out of 10 are confused by the way things work and bail instantly. 2 out of 10 might stick around, try to sign up, but everyone hammers the top 3-4 instances and they have a bad first impression. A few days later everyone is back at Reddit and Lemmy is right back where it was a month ago.

I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt I will be.

Nope, but I do use tags to group people. “Family”, “Close Friends”, “Coworkers”, etc. Does Lemmy have something like this? Like the OP, I don’t want to dig through 20 instances to find the “best”. Just show them all in one dump. The “winner take all” style won’t appeal to the masses at all.