It’s a noble goal don’t get me wrong, but cars are just way too convenient to get rid of for most that don’t live in the central zones of cities. Just things like taking your kid to their swimming lessons, evening activities, going to the tip and garden centre and dropping off at your parents en route, visiting friends that are several villages away, kids birthday party and then going to the supermarket after to pick up some food etc.
Something I’ve noticed is that people on Lemmy never seem to advocate for busses, it’s always trains.
Monthly Active Users (MAU) is probably the best metric for the health of Lemmy. A lot of these instances that are shutting down may be single-user instances or ones that people spun up just to mess about with them.
However, please donate to your instance if you can, it doesn’t have to be much :)