Absolutely.
Absolutely.
As someone who owns their own instance, it is hard to get your instance recognized. You don’t have much content because of the lack of people, and it’s hard to get content if you don’t have people join. It’s a chicken and the egg scenario. Because of this some people choose to re-post content from Reddit to attract people over to their instance. It’s great to see the Lemmy community grow, but everyone joining a few huge Lemmy servers kind of defeats the purpose of the fediverse.
Not as many as you would think. I work in a technical field and most people had no idea there was a protest going on. They also didn’t even know of alternative mobile apps. Most didn’t care and just used the official app. There may be a slight bump, but nothing significant.
Small instance with about 3 users and myself online for about 2 weeks.