It became a meme early in June after migration from the API announcement. A Lemmy user was going on like a 3 day hiking trip and posted to asklemmy what foods to pack to reduced his needed poops.

People just seem to flock to a few popular instances. The join Lemmy website needs to push harder for joining the instance that fits your interests.

It is so satisfying to see the icon turn green or click on it and see that x number of people have used your snowflake.

Lol. That's even funnier. I just glossed over the original post. Didn't realize that it was going to be Lemmy history.

It doesn't really matter where you sign up, of course unless your instance is defederated. Users just tend to funnel towards a few instances, putting some strain on the instance's servers instead of everyone being more dispersed. Lemmy.world is pretty slow right now due to the influx of users going there.

It's more of a way to try to spread out the users and communities by interests. Also decreasing the server load for the instances. Instead of having 90% of the users and a majority of the communities on Lemmy.world that is basically having everyone centralized again and the website goes dark if their servers fail.