I was trying to figure out how you got those numbers, then I went to https://the-federation.info/platform/73, sorting by number of accounts vs. active accounts. I was astonished how some sites had 30k accounts and 3 active users. Kind of sad seeing the active user ratio going from over 1 in 6 (very active) to 1 in 30 (around where it was before) in the span of 5 days.
The rocketship of registered accounts in the last 4d is indeed all bots attacking small instances where the admins are asleep at the wheel: https://lemm.ee/post/177673
The real registered user count is like 200k-300k I think. What you have to do is what the active user graphs on those pages, then extrapolate the registered graphs with a similar curve, ignoring the sharp rise when bots started flooding in this week.
That would explain it, and I see they pushed docker images for 0.18.0-rc6. I might have to give it a spin on my instance, if they are running it must be pretty safe to use.
Edit: As for pending status, if I go click the orange "Subscription pending" button then re-subscribe it joins instantly.
Edit2: larger communities take some time still but you can actively see the posts coming in.
Edit3: The larger communities require a second unsubscribe/subscribe, but all my lemmy.ml communities are now synced! Great news.
I'll wait for the final version anyway. I think is enough to pull down the new image and recreate the container I think, never did this before with Lemmy
Kinda crazy that one of the biggest lemmy instances out there is just rolling with a releases candidate. That said...the issues that 0.18.0 is supposed to address are substantial so getting it rolled out ASAP is a priority and we're still in the phase where if it breaks something, people are pretty okay with it.