There’s also the fact that a bunch of instances immediately closed registration as soon as the Reddit refugees started arriving. They couldn’t handle the sudden extra load, so they all closed their registrations. Which is their right as owners, but it also meant that virtually all the new users were funneled to the instances that were willing to expand, with Lemmy.World being one of the only ones.

Hell, I still haven’t received registration emails for most of the “we’re filtering our registrations. Click the link in your email to verify you aren’t a bot” instances I tried to register with.