Number of (active) Lemmy users seems to stabilize and I think this is a great thing. Indeed we got a lot of users when reddit shutdown its API (I was among them despite being a long time oss user), many have left, but the community seems now to stabilize to ~ ½ of the big grow in june '23. I think this is very nice for lemmy, we can be proud of this project.
The stats come from: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
imo biggest thing to watch going into this year is whether or not the groups rework on Mastodon (currently listed as in-progress on their roadmap) improves federation between the two communities. At this point, how well a service federates with the larger network is probably the single most important aspect with regards to establishing natural growth. Not surprising as the strength of the fediverse is fundamentally interoperability.