July 1, 2023 was the (known in advance) effective date of the reddit API change that killed 3rd party apps. Not really too surprising a bunch of apps for Lemmy started development leading up to that change in order to try to establish a userbase among the refugees. I was one of those refugees.
Yeah, the existing admins, mods, and users were generally quite welcoming towards new users, even as the platform grew by an order of magnitude in just a few days.