When the reddit blackout was at it's height lemmy got a huge influx of users but I think a lot of people had some misapprehensions about how lemmy would grow as a result of that. A lot of people seemed to think there was going to be some huge exodus where half of reddit said, "fuck you, I'm out!" but the reality was the vast majority of people were participating in a temporary protest and the desire of their heart was simply for reddit to go back to the way that it was. But that doesn't mean it's for nothing.

I conceive of what happened as the sowing of seeds. Some people's attention was brought to this platform and we have to water those seeds with content, and give people the opportunity to give and receive interaction. Let people comment, and have their comments commented to in turn. And when enough of that is happening we can harvest that thing that we're all really looking for in all this: Community. And if we can do that, when the next set of bad moves from reddit drives the next wave of people to look for something else (third party apps ending at the end of the month, surely old reddit soon after that), we'll have created something organic for people to glom onto and really get the ball rolling. Something I think was missing in the first round of reddit refugees.