I know it feels like its that often, but its actually still in the upper 90s atleast according to the status site, and its 89% for the last week on an external status page (which probably sees its up by attempting to load the page so its probably close to real life data)
You have to remember that until recently, there was sub 100 daily users, this wasn’t a big platform, and it wasn’t just lemmy.ml, but a bunch of <10 user instances.
It wasn’t worth paying for a small side project until it wasn’t and at that point it was too late, plus who would have predicted that the gov of Mali would forcefully take back all of their domains?
I’m not sure if it was as much of that and more so people who didn’t wanna go to another instance were complaining about how they essentially locked that name just because they throught the reddit android mods should be the true successors and some were very against the idea of just giving control to ex reddit mods. I didn’t notice it took off again either but people were really calling on the admins to replace them