Don’t know what the exact cause was/is for this big surge - but I am glad to see it. No matter what personal problems people may have with the main devs, they are doing great work on the platform.
Also of interest, since this is a good place to plug things, other threadiverse things:
And I couldn’t find a way to donate to mbin, in lieu of that:
https://docs.joinmbin.org/contributing/
EDIT: The creator of mbin gave a link in the comments: https://melroy.org/donate.html
As was brought up in those threads, but it’s simply not good enough, it’s just paying for .ml with extra steps (e.g. through their pay/salary rather than directly funding hosting costs)