“Be nice and civil” - which is a fair enough rule, but it’s always used as a blanket ban. Most of the removed comments weren’t hostile or uncivil
The thread was posted into the memes community too so there’s always going to be a bit of banter, but most comments that weren’t in support of China were removed.
I don’t think you can correlate the number of readers to the number of book instances or whatever they’re called. Most people (myself included) probably just use Goodreads, and BookWyrm is probably a good enough alternative that there’s no need to spin up another.
Edit: according to this there’s a lot of instances: https://joinbookwyrm.com/instances/