Yaaaa i don't really know the lore well but before this month, Lemmy was chugging along slowly2 with most ppl on fedi not really finding the need for it + the reputation of the devs being tankies. Kbin not even six months, this kid was just building on PHP code he got elsewhere to do both link aggregation and microblogging. As it was heating up (like shy2 announce got flagship instance etc) more ppl were trying it out (because non-tankie option? Wheeee). ETA: and unlike Lemmy the aggregation to include Fedi content is why the microblog section of the magazines slurps content from other blogs. Then Reddit Migration happened lmao. The tankie issue is still there but the redditor energy of doing their instances or choosing the existing non-tankie ones, and more developer energy to layan a fork should anything happen is also why Lemmy got a fresh burst of life, frankly.