Unless anyone knows another reason for this impressive increase in comments? Seems to roughly coincide with Sync launching. If thats the case, just goes to show the importance of good third party apps.
Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
EDIT: Looks like a confusingly labeled graph and I think this is total comments. I have no idea why that spike could exist though.
It's a very emotional thing for many of us. I've beed using reddit on sync exclusively, I just couldn't be arsed to use the web version any more.
So when they killed third party apps, reddit was dead to me. Not only because of the terrible user experience of the web site and official app, but mostly because of the way they treated the developers after all those years.
After the lemmy version came out, I opened it up and everything was back to normal (except for the missing content).
I'm really hoping that the devs of other apps succeed in the transition as well and they manage to get a good portion of their users to join as well.
As for the FOSS fundamentalists: I really don't get it. I've worked on open source projects in the past, when I felt I could contribute. I don't get all the hate being directed towards sync though. You like your FOSS-app? Great! I prefer sync and I'm happy to support the author.