> Is this an accepted stat or is this a soundbite used by 8chan supporters?
The qualifier you missed is "who were there entirely for the freedom of speech they enjoyed." There are some 60-80,000 daily users of 8chan right now, even in spite of the constant DDoSes the site has suffered over the past few weeks, and that number is only increasing; they had to come from somewhere. I've visited 4chan a few times since the split and have noticed quite a few people that seem out of place in imageboard culture, and in general a lot more of the whiny and shitposty elements that I left 4chan to get away from, so my guess is that as the older anons that craved the free atmosphere that had been slowly eroded from 4chan over the years left, they were replaced by newbies who were previously too scared to visit 4chan who figured things would be "safer" now (yes, there already existed communities like /r/4chan on reddit that consisted of people that liked "4chan humor" but were afraid of, say, stumbling across gore, and there are also a lot of people that lurk 4chan without posting that don't want to deal with trolls and arguments, who might be more likely to post now that a lot of the people they disagreed with left).
> I honestly don't see how 8chan is different from 7chan, and I'm willing to bet that after the controversy is over 8chan's influence will die down much like 7chan's.
As someone who was around for both splits, they are completely different. 7chan was an exclusive community for "oldfags" (non-imageboard users, please don't shit on me for using that word, that is the actual term they called themselves) that attempted to insulate itself from the "newfags" and "gaiafags" they believed moot was allowing to ruin 4chan. They tried to do this by being highly elitist, and banning anyone even mentioning 4chan or its memes or for not being able to keep up with the latest mod shenanigans (because apparently snacks was the most important element of 4chan to them). The site died a slow death because it didn't really have any important unique communities to offer over 4chan, and because most people got tired of the comically overbearing moderation and eventually settled for the (at the time) much more lenient 4chan.
Now that 4chan is the site with the overbearing moderation, 8chan is an inclusive community for people displaced from 4chan (mostly gamergate and /pol/), for fringe communities that previously lived in "general threads" that could now create their own boards with their own moderation (much of /vg/, parts of /a/, /lgbt/, etc), and for those that never had a home there to begin with (/furry/ is a pretty huge one that, for better or for worse, is one of the largest drivers of fresh blood into the site). Even if the boards like /v/ and /a/ with direct equivalents on 4chan died out (which they are not showing any signs of doing, even though they are admittedly smaller than the 4chan boards they split from), there is still a more than sufficient critical mass of people in the communities that have no other home on the internet that could keep the site going.
8chan is also for those like yours truly, that remember how nice 4chan used to be in the lenient days before you had to watch everything you said for fear of upsetting a mod or janitor strictly following rules that the majority of the community disagreed with, or just deleting things allowed by the rules because they personally disliked them. The days when mods didn't up-end boards they didn't even use, like what has happened to /u/, /jp/, /pol/ and /new/, and /r9k/ over the years, on a whim. The days when it wasn't tragically common for downright respectable users to have to frequently ban evade just to participate. Once I'd had a whiff of the fresh air of hands-off moderation and posters that mostly ignore things they don't like instead of whining about them ad nauseum, I realized how much 8chan reminded me of my favorite days on 4chan, and I'll never go back.
Will 8chan "beat" 4chan? I hope not. I'm happy to let 4chan serve as the "containment site" for the (IMO) most annoying parts of the community. But 8chan doesn't need to beat 4chan. It can do its own thing. Ironically, it's a bit like Hacker News vs. Reddit in that respect.
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Adding a response to malbiniak, because I've, uh, "hit the post limit" (cough):
>Within the first minute of his talk at XOXO back in 2012, he mentioned 4chan being about anonymity and ephemerality, not a blanket endorsement for freedom of all type of speech.
I know, he has said that many times, but his users didn't see things that way, and that is really the crux of this debacle: the disconnect between what moot and the rest of the 4chan staff thought 4chan was about, and what the community thought.