For me it's more about something with the potential to undermine the deathgrip of facebook, twitter, etc from our societies, in an attempt to partially address the steady increase in utter braindead stupidity and mindless vitriolic hatred stemming from profit-driven algorithmic control of our broader information ecosystem.

That requires the eventual growth of a decentralized sister ecosystem of sorts, able to act as a viable competitor. So, to compete with the giants, that's basically a fairly significant chunk of everyone. On Earth.

Fortunately you can always just defederate the highest population centers, I imagine that would become very common eventually. Especially if they tried monetization or something, which would probably not be unheard of with larger userbases.

All that said, I do feel you and also personally like smaller communities. But I'll just move to one once World gets too big.

... good point. I have a lemmy.ca alt for this exact reason.

I wish I could view other instances as a guest. I love the voyager app so much but it doesn't seem I can do this.

I don't want ro set up loads of accounts just to browse.

I'm on lemm.ee which I think has de federated with a lot but still got the tankie subs. So I'll be interested to know what I'm missing. Lemmy.world needs my email so that one can fuck off. Don't know what else to choose.

Yeah of course, it depends on the method and lot of things. Anyway, I agree with you, I'm happy with the content and the spirit of the users (less trolls and haters than on reddit or commercial social networks, more like the internet users I knew late 90s or beginning 2000s).

Up through Lemmy version 0.18.5, "active" meant posting or commenting within a specified timeframe (past month, past year, etc.). Starting with version 0.19.0 voting also counts as being active.

Different sites use different ways of calculating but often a user is considered active if they posted anything in x amount of days.

Users active in the month. Likely only people who have posted or commented.

Im not sure how up to date that roadmap is, but the pull request for group support in Mastodon has been open for 1.5 years now. And for reasons I dont understand it was made intentionally incompatible with Lemmy. So dont get your hopes up.

It took me a while to find an instance that I liked. I'm sure I counted as multiple active users until recently.

In reality, I'm the same one human who has been accessing the same servers.

Those beans ain’t going to post themselves. Get to it.

One nice part of this is that the current level means that the next big event causing a wave away from Reddit will hold onto more people, since there's content here for them to see and read. When the last big batch came over 6 months ago, it was pretty bare and a lot of people left immediately.

Oh well, just wait till inevitably reddit does something stupid again and those numbers will go sky high again.

Also, if twitter where to fail eventually and a lot of people join mastadon, I think the amount of people using lemmy would also go up because people get familair with the fediverse.

There was a huge surge of people on reddit creating accounts driven by the API saga, it wasn't natural growth. The normal expectation is that most people would only stick around a short time. Having 50% remaining after the peak is honestly impressive! I'd expect it to continue falling for a while but eventually it should start to rise when natural growth exceeds the attrition from that event.

Eh it's only just stabilized, now is exactly when we'd expect efforts for natural growth to become active. Worth noting, at this point growth probably comes from Mastodon not Reddit.

Do the instances not interact with each other? Is it like playing a game in a different server and youll never see your friends in the game? Idk how it works