Fine, sure, let's set aside the 65K then, as an outlier.

But see the stats yourself at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats. Now Lemmy shows 33K, last month it was 35K, a few months before that was 36K, before that 37K, at the turn of last year in Dec. 2025 there were 40K, and so on. This isn't "growth", this is "shrinking".

And since I am certain that there is a way to massage the stats (somehow) to get it to show a pattern of "growth", I will preemptively state that even if we were growing over this period in the past year, it's definitely not very much. So let's just agree that in the absolute very best point of view, Lemmy seems at most stagnant (or even actively shrinking) - even despite all of Reddit's abuses in the last year.

Everyone said to wait until Reddit got rid of old-reddit, and then more people would come here. Well, here we are, and they are not flocking here in droves, it's more like they are trickling in, but at less then the rate of attrition where more people leave than stay (or again, at the absolute very best, break even).

The multiple accounts thing was more about why don't we simply lump together Lemmy + PieFed to get a combined count for the entire Threadiverse at once (Mbin has <1K MAUs). I don't see as much point in making multiple Lemmy alts these days, when the major instances are more stable, but I do think that especially as PieFed continues to add such fantastic new features, that people are more likely to have both a Lemmy and a PieFed account.

So a lot of people making new PieFed accounts could be them migrating from Lemmy to PieFed... or they could simply be trying it out. i.e. like me, having two accounts, neither both on Lemmy nor both on PieFed, but rather one Lemmy and one PieFed. I see this very often especially among the most prolific posters, e.g. someone with a Lemmy.World account testing out or even stably maintaining also a PieFed.World one. Community moderation demands such behavior, though regardless of the reason, it makes cross comparisons between Lemmy and PieFed complicated. And we could get into even deeper scenarios, like someone who greatly prefers Lemmy, but since lemmynsfw.com migrated to fedinwfw.app, now maintains a separate PieFed account as well.

Moreover, I see shrinking rather than growth over the past year, but setting that aside, note that you can also adjust how far back the stats will show for, to see earlier trends. e.g. you can observe how in most of 2024 Lemmy had 45-55K MAUs. So even if we did manage to grow (rather than shrink) by like 1-2K, the background context is that would have occurred after having lost 20K MAUs over the past couple of years. This is entirely independent of the 65K peak, a year before that in July of 2023.

So wherever you consider the "high mark" to be - 65K, 55K, 45K, or even just 40K - we are below that now.

If more people are joining than leaving, then we still grow.

Sure, absolutely - but the "if" there is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Where are you seeing evidence of "growth" here? Even if you point to a specific month where that might be true, relatively speaking in comparison to the month before it, I am saying that in the long run, the overall trend that I see is downwards. Yes with some slight upswings along the way, but inexorably ever downwards. Not for Mastodon obviously, but for the Threadiverse/Lemmy

And perhaps that's okay? Or perhaps we could take the challenge to do better - e.g. find a way to avoid recommending places such as hexbear and hilariouschaos, because otherwise we are a Nazi/tankie/troll bar, indistinguishable from those others who we claim are "not" us, yet we do exceeding little to nothing at all to separate or even distinguish ourselves from such. Lemmy is the "we use Arch (Linux) btw" of the Fediverse - we here know about e.g. hilariouschaos, and take steps to avoid it, but we do next to nothing to help others not be recommended to outright join it over and above all other Threadiverse instances.

I am happy with what appears to be slow natural growth

I think most of us here would be okay with that, with most likely massive differences in how people define "slow"😉. However, that's just not what I am seeing playing out, as it seems that year by year, we are in decline. Even at the time when bc of what is happening in Reddit you would have rather expected a significant increase.

Maybe something else will happen that will turn this around, but I don't know what. Instead, I think effort is going to be required, e.g. to find a way that hilariouschaos and hexbear do not get recommended to random people looking to escape Reddit, and will likely neither enjoy their time there nor be likely to stick around long enough to figure out how to do better. As you said, we need non-technical normal folks here, if we are to thrive.

Except that we keep turning them away.