I’ve noticed this in many places in the Lemmyverse in my first few days here. When first signing up almost all the instances were listed as having 2 or less active users. The biggest was Lemmy.ml at something around 1000. Then I’ve seen those numbers listed in other places including a post yesterday that is supposed to help bring redditors to Lemmy.
These numbers will just get most people to turn around and not even consider Lemmy as an alternative.
I saw a GIF today showing the growth of user accounts on Lemmy instances and Lemmy.ml (for example) was over 30000 and many of the other servers were in the 100s, approaching 1000. That’s a HUGE difference and indicates a community that is 10 times (or more) more active than the initial numbers presented indicate.
Any thoughts? Am I out to lunch?
One of the devs also pointed out on GitHub that by showing total user count, it favors older instances, which is exactly the case with Lemmy.ml you are describing
True, we should do everything to make users spread over different instances, and not end up with a “main” instance like mastodon.social.