Yes, we’re the biggest anime community currently on the Fediverse… but 3K subscribers is still a far cry from 7M+. Admittedly, that’s an apples-to-oranges comparison since the subreddit has 10+ years of accumulated dead users boosting their stats, but 3 orders of magnitude is nevertheless a stark gap.

More importantly: there’s a decently large group of individuals who can be found participating in almost every single /r/anime discussion thread – people who go back years in the community – such as LeonKevlar and ShimmeringSky. If you frequented the subreddit, you’ve probably talked to them at some point and recognize their presence. IMO: without converting pillars like them, this place cannot claim to be the direct successor to /r/anime.

FWIW: we don’t need to be successors. Even if the subreddit dwarfs us, we’re still a top-50 Lemmy community in terms of subscribers (source). We’re big enough to have good discussion threads and those will be the engine of our long-term success. Everything else will come with time if we can just keep people coming back to talk about the things that they love watching.

It doesn’t really matter if the subreddit joins us or ignores us, because the subreddit never held a monopoly on anime discussion in the first place (e.g.: AnimeCorner Community, MAL Forums).