A post from 2 days ago presented a graph that showed an important variation in the active userbase: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/52565659
Using the daily rather than monthly view on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120 shows a much stable line (especially if you take into account Piefed's growth: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=120 )
Going through the comments in the other posts, a few recommendations that can help with the overall experience
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use different feeds: either using different Lemmy/Mbin accounts (one account per type of content), or Piefed personal feeds, but being able to browse different feeds such as "Good news", "Hobbies", "Art", "Life advice" help to see more content than politics and tech
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discover communities: subscribe to !communitypromo@lemmy.ca, !fedigrow@lemmy.zip and !newcommunities@lemmy.world to add active communities to your feeds
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go to general communities rather than specific ones: the current user base only allows so much specialization. Your favorite city builder community may not exist, but !citybuilders@sh.itjust.works does. !stationery@lemmy.world and !pen_and_paper@lemmy.world may be inactive, but !journaling@sh.itjust.works is not.
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use a client that allows for comments consolidation: I don't remember which mobile apps does it (Sync, I think?), Piefed has that feature built-in too. It allows to see all comments on a cross-post in the same view: https://piefed.zip/c/privacy/p/928874/worst-in-show-ces-products-include-ai-refrigerators-ai-companions-and-ai-doorbells#post_replies
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report toxic users and avoid communities that do not handle your reports: quite a few comments mentioned that issue in the other thread. Mods can't see everything, reporting helps to keep the atmosphere of a community enjoyable.
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use a client that implements keyword filters: quite a few mobile apps and alternative Lemmy front-ends do, Piefed has it built in. It can really help avoid the "doom and gloom" overwhelming your feed.
Finally, a few communities recommendations for lighthearted communities
I'm curious to know what PieFed's user base would look like.
Most people simply don't know about Lemmy/PieFed.
I think once features mature a bit more, if there is another rexit we could see numbers tripple or more.
Many people didn't stick around with previous rexit's because the UX sucked.
That is exactly what happened. https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats shows for instance that the numbers spiked from 352 MAUs (monthly active users) in May 2025 to >1k in June, then again to >1.6k in July, where it has mostly stabilized and we are currently at ~2.0k (half of that on piefed.social itself, half distributed across other instances, see list at https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list, click Active Users a couple times to sort that descending).
PieFed.social alone has 964 MAUs, now making it larger than such well-known instances as programming.dev, discuss.tchncs.de, lemmygrad.ml, sopuli.xyz, slrpnk.net (which announced a decision to migrate over to PieFed by the end of 2026).
Below PieFed.social, most instances have only a hundred or so users, but this too is a sign of healthy federation where many new instances keep spinning up - exactly like Lemmy where e.g. startrek.website has 152 MAUs, ttrpg.network has 127, ani.social has 172, mander.xyz has 196, and so on. Over a thousand users distributed across many instances is much healthier than all of them on a single one.
Note that most 3rd party apps haven't caught up to the PieFed software's latest API changes, so e.g. users of Voyager are mostly getting the same experience on a PieFed instance as they would have on a Lemmy one (iirc no polls, user or post flairs, categories of communities aka Topics and Feeds, etc.) - except even there, back-end changes can still be very impactful to the user experience (such as the ability of a mod to move a post from one community to another, or the ability of an end-user to block all users from a specific instance without needing admin approval to perform defederation).