I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.
the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
i don't have any data on other fediverse platforms at hand rn, but from memory IIRC mastodon has close to 1 million users, and it's by far the biggest chunk of the fediverse.
AFAIK, content-centric networks are only lemmy and piefed as of today, modeled after Reddit. lemmy is bigger (i think) with 30K (active) users.
There's also Mbin, which I'm using. And NodeBB and Discourse if we go beyond Reddit-inspired and include forums.
Good point regarding the differences in content or user driven apps. Hadn't thought of that.
It would be good to have comparable info on trends numbers and such.
Edit : quick search for reddit analysis I can't verify the legitimacy of this page.
But it states that in 2025 they had 116 million unique daily visitors, compared to 1360 million monthly users. That's i like a 1 to 12 ratio for daily & monthly users. This is just one contextual example(#E).