I was watching the counter yesterday as various subreddits went dark, and I started watching when it hit 1200, and woke up this morning with it being over 6000.
There was an initial hurdle to understanding how instances work together / how to search between them, but now that I have that figured out, it’s a lot easier. Most of the communities that I actively interacted with already have similar communities here on Lemmy. r/FountainPens was a big one for me.