I joined during the first Reddit exodus, and it seemed like for ages the amount of Lemmy content was generally increasing (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but overall increasing). Now it seems that when I sort by New, I get through everything since my last visit much more quickly than I used to. Is that my imagination, or is the activity declining?

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[–] Skavau@piefed.social 3 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

The user you are replying to has specifically sourced lemmy.world data there, which is not going to give you an overall for the wider fediverse.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 points 46 minutes ago* (last edited 40 minutes ago)

This here is a better source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=1000

That's all of lemmy over the last 1000 days.

Most important takeaways:

Active users tend to only grow during special events (usually "Reddit pulls some new shit") and then declines slowly as people fade back out.
When instances close, users tend to just disappear (as when Lemmy.ee closed down). The Lemmy.ee users seem to have just disappeared instead of migrated to another instance.
Number of active servers is in a strict decline. Apart from the initial rush, smaller instances seem to go down and don't get replaced. Most users seem to prefer to use big instances.
Comments again shows the total number of comments available, not new comments coming in. As you can see, the angle of the curve gets slightly flatter over time, meaning that activity drops. It also shows well that when instances get closed down lots of content just disappears.
Posts also shows a similar decline, though even stronger than comments.