Number of (active) Lemmy users seems to stabilize and I think this is a great thing. Indeed we got a lot of users when reddit shutdown its API (I was among them despite being a long time oss user), many have left, but the community seems now to stabilize to ~ ½ of the big grow in june '23. I think this is very nice for lemmy, we can be proud of this project.
The stats come from: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Ooof... That is terrible. Only decline. I expected it to grow at least slowly, but this is just sad. And makes the dozen (niche even) duplicate sublemmies even worse. One sublemmy for every person to take to themselves.
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
No, that's not how it works. Instances absolutely interact, that's the whole idea of federation. It can get more complicated than that if you want to get into the details of how it works, but that knowledge isn't in any way necessary to just use the platform.
So all lemmy servers can communicate with eachother, unless a server decided to "defederate" with another which cuts the connection.
Futhermore, mastodon and other fediverse projects can also communicate with lemmy and back, but since the format of the posts and comments is a bit different this might take some work for the devs to get working completely correctly.
They are (mostly) federated, which means that users from one can see what's on the others. There are a few exceptions to this, primarily for extremist content which are not federated with most of the other servers.
All four of the replies to your comment (as of now) are from users on different instances.
While the other replies are not incorrect, what they describe is users on Reddit posting on different subreddits.
What I am talking about are lots of niche subreddits (many even about the same topic!) thus that out of the few people that are here, there is simply no content, let alone discussions of the present content.