One thing that I think has catapulted the amount of people flocking to lemmy.world is the reputation of the instance as being run by competent people as well as having a very decent uptime especially compared to other large instances at the time of the Reddit blackouts.

People just want to be on an instance that’s trustworthy and reliable. Thus, I kind of understand why people just piled onto Lemmy.world. Besides, a lot of them just got redirected to Lemmy.world by well-meaning people who just wanted to keep things simple–simple for the refugees who just wanted simple instructions (without having to choose an instance with everything that entails).