Actually, according to lemmyverse.net (great place for comm discovery btw!) and my own experience cross posting .ml content, .ml is almost entirely held up by a core set of the most diehard tankie users. Most .ml comms are overshadowed by comms on other instances with much higher Monthly Active Users numbers.

The comm search field goes by pure subscriber count which doesn’t really decrease for any reason other than a user actually unsubscribing from a comm so all of those insane numbers on some .ml comms are just overinflated and don’t reflect actual traffic. It’s full of dead and/or banned accounts, alts and some still active users