Good to see, but as with all posts like this, it’s important to note that the really important number is “Active Users” That number has gone up significantly as well, just not as fast as number of accounts.
It took me months to actually start using Lemmy and Mastodon. I would consider myself a tech savvy person and it still took a while getting used too. I think there need to be better tutorials linked on the sign-up pages that help people understand the basic concepts. That would help drive true user acquisition.
I just started with mastodon. Lemmy I'm pretty understanding at but do you have any people/ hashtags you reccomend following on mastodon to not make the whole place feel so small and repetitive? I'm interested in pretty much anything.
Honestly, with Mastodon, I'm at the same place. I signed up with a very specific and small instance and it's a ghost-town. I don't have the time to search around for content. I'll probably start looking for a larger default instance and go from there.
I use the advanced UI and have various columns pinned with hashtags I'm interested in. Just jumping in and joining convos, commenting on interesting projects I see etc has worked fine for me, got two accounts on two fairly small servers and they both have very active feeds and lots of engagement.
Pick something you want to talk to people about, and just go for it tbh.
From the docs: "Lemmy also shows counts of active users for your site, and its communities. These are counted within the last day, week, month, and half year, and are cached on starting up lemmy, and every hour.
An active user is someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame. For site counts, only local users are counted. For community counts, federated users are included."