Couldn’t say, but it did cause me to unfollow the cat community I was following because my feed was unbrowseable outside of void cats.

I’m just seeing them go viral on Lemmy. If they were going viral outside of Lemmy, too, that might cause an uptick in user registrations. Hell, some of the previous meme fads weren’t even new to Lemmy. Beans aren’t new or exclusive to Lemmy. Neither was pondering the orb, nor are the voids.

Beans happened a while ago

I’ve never seen something “go viral” like this on lemmy before.

I think they are just trends that start becoming popular because people are bored. At least, that’s how it can start.

I imagine for every user that’s like “that’s cool!”, there’s another user who’s like “alright time to avoid Lemmy for a while”, so perhaps there is not much to glean from the metrics.

Am interested in any data too though, if it’s there