It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping.
Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren't attracted enough to become regular visitors.
Curious to see at which number we'll stabilize.
Next peak will probably happen after either major features release (e.g. exhaustive mod tools allowing reluctant communities to move from Reddit) or the next Reddit fuck up (e.g. removing old.reddit)
If the stats are accurate then this is not necessarily due to people being unhappy and leaving as both comments and posts are still stable - indicating that the lower active count are lurkers, duplicates or otherwise non engaging accounts.
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if duplicate accounts are a part of this but that seems like it would be a natural part of growing pains for lemmy. The way the fediverse is built would suggest that people who are serious about long-term participation may bounce around a bit. For example, I joined in June but in that time I still managed to test out two other instances before settling on a third that seemed to strike the ideal balance between admin policies and reliable uptime to suit my needs.
Right. Everything negative about Lemmy is being turned into a positive for some reason. Truth is this is still a difficult concept for a lot of people to get on board with and the overall reliability of instances leaves much to be desired. All we need to do is continue to contribute and see what takes off.
But just remember: Some of those people that are not staying are the types of people you wouldn't want to interact with anyway. If the roughly 10k people who quit were Nazis (for example), it's a good thing.
As I said in a comment below, I would like this to be a signal for interest groups to choose one of the dozens communities they have, stick to one and make it grow.
Looking at gaming or books, always seems detrimental to have the . world, .ml, .sh.itjust.works and so on with the same content posted everywhere.