The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
To emphasize this discrepancy, based on these numbers, if one tenth of one percent of reddit’s monthly active users switched to lemmy, that would represent more than 600% growth in the lemmy userbase. So yeah. Sharp growth here isn’t necessarily a sharp decline there.
But if the tiny minority that leaves is the same group that’s willing to spend dozens of hours a week for free keeping the site free of spam and hate and keeping forums on topic, that has a pretty outsized impact on the quality of the site moving forward. So the small number isn’t to say that reddit wasn’t hurt by the exodus. It’s just to say that lemmy growth numbers aren’t a good indicator of that impact.