https://the-federation.info/platform/73 says for lemmy we have: 1,073,211 Users
It also says that: Last month users: 38897
Which is 2 orders of magnitude of a difference. If you look at the list of instances there ones like https://the-federation.info/node/details/48405 which have 50k users and 10 active last month users.
That means almost all of the 1 milion users are fake users.
I’m seeing people celebrating every 100k users every couple of hours without realizing this.
It’s also probably inflated due to people making multiple accounts. I’m sure there’s lots of us (myself included) who made an account on one instance and then decided to swap to a different one.
That’s true. I first tried to create an account at beehaw but forgot about my application so I ended up on lemmy.world because it had open signups, so there’s at least 1 “useless” user account there.
Seeing how beehaw shut themselves off, things kinda worked out for me lol.