Actually, I was getting that same feeling about those 'hundreds of thousands of devices' you mentioned. "From Ashes" started begin 2016 as far as I can see, that would mean upto a steady 50,000 devices each month. That's a pretty enthousiastic number.
Except we have the analytical statistics over the course of most of the year to back up such claims. So not enthusiastic but realistic. There's a difference. It's like how you would know 50,000 devices are running LibreELEC. Yes, not an exact science but it's the best we have. The hypothetical 50,000 is of course a number we both just pulled to make a point but we know that LibreELEC only makes up about 0.86% of the From Ashes userbase and OpenELEC smaller than that. OSMC has 2%. Than it's all the usuals such as Android, Windows, normal Linux, OS X, etc.
My point is that there is nothing wrong with you all being a small distribution and that being succesful even in the slightest is still success. The reasons for why one cannot accept a compliment of success even while being small is a reason we don't normally reach out to the smaller distributions.
0.86% is less than 3,000 devices. We're willing to let 3,000 devices go just on the basis of not having to deal with LibreELEC again as it does seem to be more trouble than it's worth to communicate with a smaller group; likely because said smaller groups tend to have a greater attachment to what they put out and don't like to be classified as "small" to begin with even though they are.
Userbase size that is small yet devoted to what you create should be taken as a compliment. Both LibreELEC and OpenELEC are small distributions based on userbase and also based on our information about how our users install the From Ashes skin. To us, that makes you a tiny blip on a radar with far more concerning fish in the sea but to your users you are of course bigger to them even if there are a number that would switch to OSMC if we didn't work it out with the other two distributions.
