this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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I saw a discussion the other day that may have been part of it. They were pointing out that many users when first joining lemmy created accounts on multiple instances. Whether they needed to find a community they preferred or do to ddos attacks and other issues causing outages a lot of those accounts have likely become inactive more as time went by. So the numbers may not be decreasing so much as been inflated by individuals coming up as multiple active users early on. I haven't looked into how they are verifying what users are active though, so it could be wrong. If someone knows more please respond.
Yeah, my first account on Lemmy was actually on Beehive, but I was confused by their sign up process (there wasn't a page update telling me I had to verify my email, it just happened in the background and didn't appear to do anything when I clicked sign up). I sorted it out when I checked my email an hour later, but that killed the vibe for me. So then I made this account, but jerboa didn't support Aussie zone at the time so I made a shitjustworks account and used that for a while until I started becoming more active in the Aussie zone communities and tried to jump ship just for the ease
But yeah, I saw quite a few people who were very confused about the whole instances thing and a few others that have jumped ship a few times because of it. And as I mainly browse local top day, then all top day once that runs out of content, and my instance federates with all the instances I want to interact with, I don't see a reason to use either of those other accounts I created
As far as I have heard, "activeness" is measured by whether a user posted a comment/post the past month, so lurkers/voters are not being counted. This does likely skew the numbers quite a bit.
EDIT: Found this nice answer from ~5 months ago. Yup, it appears to only count post+comment and leaves out voters and lurkers. :(
I was on this really great cyberpunk / LGBT instance called DATATERM.digital. It was even advertised on the joinlemmy page. However it disappeared without a trace and there is no word on it ever coming back :( I haven't found another one where I felt at home.