You gotta stop counting total users. Only active users should be counted. We know there's utterly massive numbers of bots being created. Plus people have multiple accounts from trying out different instances even if they'll only use one.
Yup, came here to say that as well. it's al bots. The active users graph is much more realistic.
And I've been seeing some...odd looking.... comments recently from users at instances known for being mostly bots. Some of these comments really look AI generated, and have a suspicious number of upvotes.
Good to see, but as with all posts like this, it’s important to note that the really important number is “Active Users” That number has gone up significantly as well, just not as fast as number of accounts.
From the docs: "Lemmy also shows counts of active users for your site, and its communities. These are counted within the last day, week, month, and half year, and are cached on starting up lemmy, and every hour.
An active user is someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame. For site counts, only local users are counted. For community counts, federated users are included."
It took me months to actually start using Lemmy and Mastodon. I would consider myself a tech savvy person and it still took a while getting used too. I think there need to be better tutorials linked on the sign-up pages that help people understand the basic concepts. That would help drive true user acquisition.