Like @[email protected] said, those sites have instances drop on and off the rankings all the time. I had been checking lemmyverse quite frequently over the past couple months…for no reason I am going to mention in this thread…and instances will disappear and reappear every couple days. The ml instance in particular was prone to that. No foul play going on, just typical software flakiness.
People aren’t linking it directly because admins have a history of removing any comments/posts that provide a link. However, you can see it if you go to a community browser like Lemmy Explorer.