Number of (active) Lemmy users seems to stabilize and I think this is a great thing. Indeed we got a lot of users when reddit shutdown its API (I was among them despite being a long time oss user), many have left, but the community seems now to stabilize to ~ ½ of the big grow in june '23. I think this is very nice for lemmy, we can be proud of this project.
The stats come from: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
What defines an active user?
Up through Lemmy version 0.18.5, "active" meant posting or commenting within a specified timeframe (past month, past year, etc.). Starting with version 0.19.0 voting also counts as being active.
aka, the lurkers 👀
I've always upvoted both posts that are on topic to the community and always to people who take the time out of their day to reply.
It's like common courtesy to me and votes are like free confetti anyways.
So I suppose the OP's figures are, off.
Yep, there must be lots of uncounted lurkers. If you look at the active user charts at The Federation there was a spike in December when 0.19.0 released. I expect we'll see more spikes as additional instances upgrade to 0.19.
https://the-federation.info/platform/73
I am uncounted, but next month I will be active!
Interesting. It's not really relevant to this graph because it only shows one instance but I'd be curious to see what percentage of Lemmy's total active users are people with multiple accounts on different instances
I suspect abandoned alt accounts are a huge reason for the long, slow decline in user numbers. These graphs should be titled "active accounts," not "active users."
Different sites use different ways of calculating but often a user is considered active if they posted anything in x amount of days.
Users active in the month. Likely only people who have posted or commented.