I’m a bit confused at the explosive growth of Lemmy and the slower growth of Kbin. Do the stats reflect the reality or is there a problem with the data being fed back to the various stat hubs?
I know the difference is partly because Lemmy was a larger platform, and is better known but the growth of Kbin seems suprisingly flat while the community seems to be getting more and more active?
Yes, it’s different. Self-hosting means you set up a running version of kbin (or whatever) on your own server. All the different domains you see (lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, lemmy.world, kbin.social, fedia.io etc etc) are on their own servers. Theoretically you could also set up a version where you are the sole user even.