How do you see the past numbers there though, without conflating the Mastodon users that says that we have ~1 million MAUs?

This one likewise says 43k MAUs right now, though I don't recall how many we had in February. The other site only shows as far back as June, 48k MAUs. So that's a drop of 5k MAUs since June.

Assuming the numbers are comparable across the two sites like that - and they seem to agree as far as we can tell - it looks like the numbers went up sometime between February and June, but since then we've lost almost all that we gained.

i.e., the Reddit drama may have caused people to come check us out, but then the largest majority of people left, likely going right back to Reddit. Possibly bc of the deep (niche) content stores that they still have - e.g. if everyone else uses Windows, it's just easier for you to use it too, and it takes a special mindset to buck that trend.:-)