Fediverse

I think there has been some influx where a lot of new users made room for themselves while pressing others to leave/defederate. Beehaw was the notable and initial example where the growth of people from reddit resulted in less interactivity.

I don't think quantity is necessarily the most interesting metric. Quality of discussion and other users is more interesting to me and it has been quite good so far for the communities I frequent.

yes

Is Lemmy growing or shrinking?

It looks like Lemmy has shrunk overall since our peak of 68k active users in July last year to our low point (since rexxit anyways) of 32k, but we seem to be attracting more MAUs now and have climbed back up to 51k.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by diversity, or at least what measure of it you're seeking, but if you mean instances, there's currently ~770 instances online, a bit over half of our peak in July. I'm not aware of any major instances that have closed down yet though, so I assume it's mainly small, single user instances that have shit down, as well as a few hyper niche ones with very few members.

Average users per instance has also been increasing and is getting close to the levels we were at in june when everybody was joining the same few instances. That peak was 690 users per instance, that dropped to a low of 321 in July, presumably because there was more of an emphasis on getting people spread out after initial influx of people who just needed to go somewhere.

There was something interesting I noticed in the stats, in Feb there was a major drop in total posts of almost 5 million. I don't know what exactly happened, but our total posts halved, so perhaps that's why nobody's been posting updates.

It's even more obvious on the 120 day graph

Overall, it appears we have shrunk compared to our peak during rexxit, but we have been steadily increasing in both active users and posts (excluding the major drop in Feb) since our low point a couple of months after rexxit. That's about what I'd expect, and quite good compared to most popular corpo sites which lose a lot more percentage of their MAUs after they've peaked. Threads lost something like 80% of their userbase a week after it launched. Also I don't think that peak during rexxit will be our biggest peak. We'll probably continue steadily gaining users until Reddit fuck up again and we get another influx, like what happened with mastodon.

FYI all these stats are fairly easy to find. I like FediDB because it's got a more friendly UI, but Fediverse Observer has a more plain UI, so is better for posting graphs and such. But that's the beauty of the fediverse, we can all access the same things through all sorts of UIs