Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Lemmy determine active users differently now, as compared to then? I recall a .world post about that, contemporaneous to when active users spiked. In any case, I appreciate the new folks!
That's true, originally only users that posted or commented were counted as active. Then they changed it to count users who had voted as active, even if they didn't post or comment.
But I believe that change occured almost one year ago, in March 2024. You can see a big spike of active users at that time. Starting this January we've seen some really nice organic growth, although it's not nearly to the level of the API exodus. We still need more users, but it's really encouraging to see some solid growth after over a year of stagnation/slow decline.