The novelty has worn off. Contributions are going to fall to the baseline for this platform. Question is, is the Lemmy space going to expand from that point?

It’s normal. Chill. Not like Threads that lost 80% of its active users.

I think people who've only ever known reddit/instagram/twitter will find it dull, but this is still a relatively active place with quality users and mods.

The bigger and more reddit-like it gets the harder it will be to moderate and the more expensive it will be to run. Things are fine right now.

Sync's already had over 10k downloads, but the ability to post (apart from comments) hasn't yet been added. Once that happens I imagine there'll be a decent spike.

This is an expected statistical artifact given the "last month" aggregation and a huge influx of new users of which many don't stick around. I am saying they don't stick around, because that's generally just what happens with a lot of new users (e.g. they checked it out, decided it's not for them) and also due to the federated nature they might have switched accounts and similar things. Then the bit about "last month" aggregation: Have a look at the "Active 6 months" graph - it's still trending upwards. Those are likely a trailing average aggregations, so a maximum is reached when that 1-month-window starts (roughly) at the beginning of the huge user influx. For the 6-month window that hasn't happened yet, so still going upwards. Assuming nothing changes (similar amount of new/leaving active users) the graphs gonna be interesting in the next few weeks: After the initial wave of influx the balance was most likely negative (more users from "the wave" dropping out again than added users afterwards), however I'd hope it's gotten positive since then. If that's the case the graph should start trending upwards 1 month after the balance became positive. It's unclear when that was the case, but some towards end of July might be a reasonable guess? The same graph with a smaller window could shed some light on that (or just expose useless noise ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ).

Another sign I'd consider good: The active user ratio is trending upwards.

Disclaimer: I don't know how the data is aggregated, nor how exactly "active" is defined - the gist of the above very likely applies though. I was too lazy to look it up in the code - if someone knew how these graphs are aggregated and were so kind to let me know, that'd be appreciated :)

Can bot cleaning explain this?

As a new user, I kind of can’t get over the idea that bots just seem to scrape links and repost them here.

That seems to be most of the contributions to communities to me.

Growth is not always consistent.

Could be something to do with frequent outages. Every now and then I will have error jump out. I then give up for a day and then try using tomorrow.

I would also note that some instances with the ml ending like fmhy.ml got wiped out of existence a few weeks ago because Malaysia forcefully took back that domain suffix back. I was on there and had to make a new account elsewhere after I saw it wasn't going to come back up.

The number of users are just stabilising. This is expected after a sudden spike in users.

I will admit, I was hard into Lemmy at first, but then gradually slipped back into the Reddit habit. This is my first visit to the site in a few weeks.

That decline is slower than I expected. It shows that more people stay than not

Because every post is just Lemmy users jerking themselves off raving about how much cooler they are than Reddit.

It's so fucking cringe I I can't scroll more than 5 minutes without giving up.

People always tend to bounce back to the bigger platform.

How I like to deal with this is to use two or more platforms of the same kind.

Occasionally open Reddit, and occasionally Lemmy. Occasionally checking Fedi, and occasionally going on Twitter.

It may be disorienting at first, but it's better to get used to going on many websites than sticking to just two.

Once Boost for Lemmy releases, 10, 000% growth will occur over the coming weeks afterward 😉 (IYKYK)

The very gentle slope towards normalization is quite good, actually.

Being new to Mastodon and Lemmy I personally struggle to figure things out. Just finding a brief summary on how Lemmy works in contrast to reddit has, so far, yielded no helpful results. While I think for me this is just a matter of sticking with the services I can imagine that a lot of people would check in, struggle and check out again.

The, let's call it infrastructure, of Lemmy and the way registration works due to the fediverse is quite different to what most people are used to.