So startrek.website have cleaned out their spam bots. Looking at the graph of their user counts on fedidb gives a sense of the time course of the spam bot problem.
https://fedidb.org/network/instance/startrek.website
If you presume the same time course for lemmy as a whole (which fits, see here: https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse), lemmy’s true user count is somewhere between its June 18 and 19 numbers … ~200k, somewhere around Pixelfed/peertube territory.
@fediverse@lemmy.ml @fediversenews@venera.social
As it is in the mastodon post.
TLDR - lemmy’s current user count is probably somewhere just above 200k (between June 18 and June 19 numbers). Arguably higher as the larger lemmy instances like lemmy.world are likely to have quicker real growth than a niche instance.
I think post/comment frequency is the best metric tbh. Activity matters more than user count.
Exactly, I don’t care about user count but posts and comments.