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
It would be nice if servers could be tuned to prioritize locally hosted communities over remote ones. There’s a real opportunity for each community on the same topic to have distinct flavours and cultures, but so long as they all appear to be the same damn thing and appear with the same frequency in the content stream, it’s never going to happen. It’s not like people really look at the remote server domain.
It’s really nice that the Local feed exists, but when people just bulk subscribe to 8 different communities with the same name, stick to their subscription list, and then treat them all as the same place, that just kills a lot of potential for heterogeneity.
That’s what people are used to from Reddit. They’re used to having one giant subreddit about one topic. That’s why everyone’s centralized themselves on lemmy.world or kbin.social. That’s why one of the most requested features is the ability to make “multireddits” (or otherwise combining all different communities into one)
This is a culture problem to solve, technical solutions can only do so much to help.
@ShittyKopper why is a multi community feature an issue? I want to see what more than one fed server says on a topic and maybe have some cross list merging to increase efficiency.
If you are explicitly aware that different instances specialize in different concerns I can absolutely see the use for a feature like that, but most people want a feature of that sort just so they can “paper over” federation and pretend to have one giant community with one giant moderation policy / culture / priorities.
And that is before getting to the absolutely horrible idea of automatically generating multi-communities by merging communities with the exact same name regardless of their instance.