I've been watching the stats on occasion and lately, I've noticed that Lemmy's number of active users has been decreasing. (for the last month at least).

While the number has been on an upward trend for the last 6 months

Last month's stats have been less than rosy.

So could anyone explain how this might affect Lemmy? I think I've read before that only people who post or comment count as active users, but seeing it go down is kinda alarming. So am I right in thinking that Lemmy has been losing active users since July 11 or am I missing something?

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[–] Contramuffin@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

When looking at graphs, it's extremely important to consider all possible aspects that the data isn't capturing. A lot of the time, it's easy to take the "easy" interpretation of the data and get the wrong conclusion (for instance, think about survivor bias and how it almost led the British military to the wrong conclusion about where to reinforce their warplanes)

Here, it's important to remember several things: what exactly is the data counting? And what happened that might change our interpretation of the data?

For the first, it's unclear what the statistic is, but I think the general interpretation is that "active users" only counts people who have posted or made comments. For the second, ofc the Reddit Migration just happened a month ago. The fact that it happened almost exactly a month ago likely isn't a coincidence.

Here's my interpretation: people from Reddit jumped on board to Lemmy during the Reddit Migration. They posted or commented a lot to test out the waters on Lemmy. Then, once they settled in, they started lurking (after all, the vast majority of people lurk). As the month continued, these new users are no longer considered active users, since they're only lurking. So the "active last month" count is dipping almost exactly 1 month after the Reddit Migration. Of course, part of the dip can be explained by people moving back to Reddit. But based on my understanding of how "active users" is counted, I think this is the leading explanation, especially since Lemmy feels more active now than during the Migration.

Now, what can we conclude about the dip? Honestly, if my interpretation is correct, this seems pretty normal. I wouldn't think too deeply about it. As Reddit enshittification continues, we might expect more waves of migrants, and I generally expect that we'll see this pattern every time (a sudden increase in userbase, followed by a shallow dip after 1 month, and then the number starts to stabilize)