I exclusively surf “top 6 hours” and I’ve actually noticed an uptick in niche community content, lately. Different kind of growth, maybe a sort of settling into itself, finally.

Honestly a lot of it is probably people getting comfortable lurking again, Lemmy only counts post and comments as active users

Lemmy is neither popular nor heavily advertised, so people join at a slow rate

On the other hand, the amount political discussions, Hexbear, and lack of content result in disinterested people leaving Lemmy and joining Reddit

So the user count is decreasing because Reddit refugees are leaving faster than new people are joining