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:
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
All three are quite different, which actually makes following their respective growth more interesting to me.
I suppose it's fair that Tildes is not truly "competing" since they're invite-only. I don't have an account there but I've heard they want to focus on long-form high effort posts, so it's never going to be real competition on terms of size, though it will be interesting to see whether a site with that profile can grow enough to thrive.
I'm not a fan of Squabbles personally but some people obviously are since they're at 30k users soon. It's run by a single person, and I am a little worried about whether that persons individual preferences influence development too much and in general the way development is heading. I don't like the layout and I think the logo and name are a hindrance in terms of mass adoption.
On a larger scale though, Squabbles doesn't allow any NSFW, and that is the benchmark I'm most interested in. Can a site of this nature reach critical mass without it?
Honestly, now that you say it…that does sound like quite the case study.