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
This is only looking at active users.
If we look at total users and servers across all Fediverse software you can see both are up.
I personally am not interested in making the active user count always go up. The Fediverse maybe better then Silicon Valley, but the health problems being on the internet too much is still there.
I don't see why we should consider accounts that haven't been used in 6 months, we're talking about content contributions (posts/comments/votes) and those inactive accounts aren't doing anything for that
Active users are what matter. Dormant accounts aren't doing anything.
IDK if there's a way to tell on Lemmy whether an account is dormant. I haven't posted or commented on reddit in years, but I still log in and talk to people over PM. So my account there isn't dormant, but also has no visible activity.
Anyway someone further up described a big Lemmy problem, which is link dumping. I think on reddit, moderators tend to delete those, unless the poster makes some kind of effort to at least bypass clickbait and say what the link is about.
reddit goes pretty hard against link dumping,or sharing, its bannable offense. reddit also for some reason started cracking down on new and old inactive account as potential bots, so its risky for new users there.
Relatively there are less US users here compared to Reddit ("only" 50%). Seems the whole demographics is different too.