I don’t think lemmy is still growing. I might be wrong but this graph https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
is trending down and i’ve seen a lot of smaller magazines/communities that haven’t had any posts for 1-2weeks by now.
I try to help that problem at little but i doubt lemmy&kbin has >100k active users right now.
Meta has a monetary interest in divering from the activity hub standard. They will use it to stand out from all other federated instances with cool features you can only use on meta instances.
New people will join metas instances because they are “clearly better” and it will be difficult to deny. Sure there will be ads, privacy concerns etc. but most people don’t care about that.
The rest of the federated network will over time lose users to meta because people want to stay connected and that’s difficult to do when two instances don’t share the same features.
The end result is meta oficially forking activity hub and disconnecting from the rest of the federated network.
It’s the death of activity hub and what we are trying to build here.
The only way to prevent it is by preventing meta instances from taking off. The main way to do that is to not allow their instances to benefit from the rest of the federated network and to inform meta users of better alternatives. It’s impossible for a disorganized opensource project to keep up with the features that 1000’s of meta developers are paid to do.
According to the graph it accounts for active users within the last 30 days. 30Days ago the reddit strike started and an influx of people started posting. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people haven’t been here since. There was a lot of performance and other issues with lemmy&kbin at that time.