Don’t know what the exact cause was/is for this big surge - but I am glad to see it. No matter what personal problems people may have with the main devs, they are doing great work on the platform.
Also of interest, since this is a good place to plug things, other threadiverse things:
And I couldn’t find a way to donate to mbin, in lieu of that:
https://docs.joinmbin.org/contributing/
EDIT: The creator of mbin gave a link in the comments: https://melroy.org/donate.html
Dev posted few weeks ago about donations being a little short and having lowered making it more difficult to support development. A lot of people then started to donate or increase their financial support.
Edit : for reference https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005
Ah, yes, that was right at the time where I was having peak personal stress/health issues and only did the bare minimum admin work on Lemmy and my other platforms, no wonder I missed it. Glad to see people actually responded to the call to action, though!