G'day! Melbournian is the most common term for us, although I'd usually drop the o to emphasise its Mel-burn and not mel-born (although it's usually said Melb'n, but that's a whole other story!)

My theory on why we're so active: these daily threads were previously going on the melbourne subreddit for years, so when r/Melbourne went dark for the protests, there was a lot of oragnising to get people here. A few people came, and since everybody in the DT knows each other, they told everyone else and then everybody started moving over here. A few people refused to come, but enough people came, and enough others were forced to come when the sub vanished that we formed our own community.

If you want your mind blown even more - look at the thread from June 15th 2023. Over 600 comments on it! A few of those people went back to Reddit as soon as the subreddit reopened, but enough stayed that it didn't just become a group of 3 people like a lot of other communities. Our other city communities like !Brisbane@aussie.zone sometimes have DTs too, but only get 5 or 10 comments, so that's meant that our DT kind of ends up attracting people from all around australia since we're so active and such awesome people (lol)

It's actually a pretty even in terms of comments between us and r/Melbourne. Their thread is currently at 159 comments and ours is at 119 (this thread was actually posted 5 hours early)

Not sure if any of this actually answered your question, but the TL;DR is that these DTs were happening on Reddit for many years and the community split in 2 during the shit reddit pulled last year. Most of the long term active people moved here, although a couple stayed back on reddit.