Criteria: I’m looking for instances that are defed’ with the Big 3 tankies (lemmygrad, lemmy.ml, and hexbear). I have no interest in trying to persuade my friends to create an acc and set up instance blocks before diving in, or dealing with the feedback when they run into the tankie brigade.
Edit: lemmy.cafe and infosec.pub seem to fit. I also find it really interesting just how many of the replies totally ignored my stated criteria.
I think I found the best one:
infosec.pub
has 4186 total users and 335 active users
seems more active than the .cafe that the other user suggested
Good luck with converting more people to join Lemmy!