Likely a combination of the community having more tech savvy individuals + realising Reddit would fuck over r/Piracy eventually, making more of them follow dbzer0 here when they were overthrown.
govt of mali let use freenom .ml domains, then freenom removed them for reasons, one of reasons being that it got traction. (?) they have moved since to fmhy.net
Oh yes, I have heard a lot of cases like this related to freenom. They deactivate domains that get traction and resell them at a premium (mostly to spammy ad networks that hoard domains).