Remember when forums would be super active with, like, 500 users?
"Millions of users" is a vanity stat. The critical mass needed to keep a discussion group alive is actually quite small -- assuming you're interested in, you know, discussing things. So, how active "Lemmy" is is entirely dependent on which topics you're interested in.
All I know is that i can mindlessly scroll for about 2 hours before I start hitting the NSFW content, at which point refreshing the feed sifts the new stuff to the top and is still good for another hour or so
I run into a lot of the same names, but I think that's fine (if not preferable)
The active user base is trending slightly downward as a few instances have shut down recently but the amount of registered users is steadily increasing so those trends will reverse as the largest barrier to entry is just knowing about Lemmy and creating an account.
The stats are irrelevant, imo. What matters is how useful lemmy is both to average users and specialty users.
Right now, the more niche the hobby/interest is, the less useful lemmy is unless it fits into the handful of subjects that lemmites grok.
That being said, for general use, lemmy is great. Plenty of memes, plenty discussion about subjects of general interest, and plenty of posts for casual scrolling on the john. In that regard, it's better than bigger forums because you don't have to scroll through a dozen fake posts to find things that interested a fellow human.
I can usually, on bad days when I'm not very mobile, spend an hour or so on lemmy before I get back to where I had previously left off. That's about the sweet spot, imo.
I'm an active user who post and comment regularly, and I would say that the experience is very similar to Reddit. Except for less adds and smaller numbers on the main/all page. The experience is probably very different if you're mainly a passive consumer of content.
Though I've never been active in "large" subreddits and I tend to block them from my feed. So guess I don't know what I'm missing.
If you care about American politics and being outraged at every and any thing thrown at you during the day, it is active enough. However you are SOL if are curious about any other topic that does not involve narcissistically talking about yourself.
Assuming you are invested enough to find or create a community for a topic you care about, be prepared to be talking to yourself for a long time and consider yourself lucky if you manage to get 2 other people commenting on it.
The economics of a social platform relies on growth over time and Lemmy is growing at the perfect pace because it’s not a single entity but a collaborative entity.
Once bigger federations break through to the mainstream market you’ll see the relevance of smaller federations growing along with it as it becomes a ‘bigger’ ecosystem
Mentioned in the comment section below what is necessary for community growth and it doesn’t require millions, only a few hundred active members.