Same, I just found it after seeing the lemmy instances graph. It’s nothing to sneeze at.

It’s fairly big relative to other lemmy instances because it’s been around for over 3 years, and it was a lifeboat site for people that frequented r/chapotraphouse before it was banned from reddit (which was a relatively huge sub).

Over the past year or so they worked to switch from a heavily modified fork of lemmy back to a more modern upstream version of lemmy, mostly by redeveloping and contributing features that were missing, like custom emojis, to upstream lemmy. So now there’s more attention being paid since it is now using a federation-compatible version of lemmy and intends to actually federate with a limited subset of the lemmyverse