Very fair point, thanks for your feedback! We'll definitely try to be more transparent in the future. In this case, I think what happened is that none of the mods saw the existing lemmy.ml instance as something that actually was large enough to matter or that was ever official, so from our view this was less "moving to another instance" than it was "we'll start out on lemmy.world, those of you that already gathered on lemmy.ml on their own, here's your FYI that we won't be going there".

I can definitely see how it came across differently, and how we might have underestimated the connection people already felt to the lemmy.ml instance. Sorry for that!

(Also a quick note: It'd have been more or less impossible to have this poll on reddit because mentioning lemmy would be likely to give reddit enough reason to yeet the existing team -- thus discord is/was the only other official channel of communication. However, even there, we didn't really make this much of a public discourse, thus this is more of a sidenote than an actual defense)