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)
Stats on each server: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
Yeah, I tend to think that most of the people who left wouldn’t be valuable members of the community anyway. Maybe they’re too impatient to deal with software that isn’t fully mature, maybe they can’t deal with the fact that most Lemmy instances are somewhere between leftish and outright communism, or maybe the somewhat chaotic nature of the fediverse turns them off. Whatever. I hope they find something that suits them.
I also hope, for their own sake, that the “something” doesn’t involve going back to reddit.