Some small instances are seeing sudden increases in numbers of registered users (4k to 5k new users) but not an equivalent growth in activity, my guess is someone is creating accounts on instances without captcha enabled for account registration. Most of the top 10 fastest growing instances shown here fit that criteria.

[–] maegul@hachyderm.io 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

@Odo Interesting. Lemmy is somewhat strict in its definition of "active user". You must post to be "active", so all lurkers aren't counted.

I'm not even sure commenting counts toward being "active", though I'd guess it does.

So user growth without growth in "active users", especially on smaller servers, is plausible.

[–] Odo@startrek.website 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I guess that's possible. The instances I mentioned look like this:

https://fedidb.org/network/instance/parapheum.com

2 posts, 1 comment overall.

It had 10 users two days ago and 4.6k today, not a single one of them seems to have posted or commented.

[–] maegul@hachyderm.io 1 points 1 year ago

@Odo

So going to that instance, and going to its list of federated communities (https://parapheum.com/communities/listing_type/All/page/1) shows a few sizeable ones. Also note the instance's description (see https://parapheum.com/) which is basically to distribute the server load without any commitment to any particular kind of community.

So, could be full of lurkers, or parallel accounts created to avoid server overload that will be soon dropped. So probably some bloat in these numbers, as there are for other platforms too