We’re seeing an increase from 53k active users at the beginning of July to 72k active users at the time of this post.
According to Lemmy’s documentation, an active user is "someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame.” Lurkers aren’t considered active users, so basically these are content creators on Lemmy.
Sources:
Impressive stats all around. The way that reddit and reddit-likes work with feeds/frontpages you don’t need millions and millions of users for a place to feel active and worth visiting. Reddit was an interesting place all the way back in 2010 when I first started going there, and I imagine they had an order of magnitude less users back then in the pre-smartphone app era.
With more users you get more of an eternal september effect… but you also get tons of people that might frictionlessly see and participate in more nische communities.
I think that a lot of the early migrants are tech savvy (not just chronically online), and have seen the dawn of multiple eternal Septembers. I think this is partly why everybody is doing their part to encourage conversation, because we all remember what a platform that has passed the critical mass looks like, vs one that has not.
I hope that the leaders of the Fediverse listen to their users, and allow people who understand how to improve the user experience contribute without stubbornly sticking to their ideas of how things should be run, while at the same time preventing the 'verse from turning into another soulless vanity factory.