From 2,997 active users across all lemmy instances at the beginning of June, the number increased to 52,797 by June 30th. Source.
An active user on Lemmy is "someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame.” Source. That means lurkers are not counted as active users. There are currently almost 200k total users spread across the top 10 non-bot lemmy instances.
We're really building something here!
EDIT: Looking for a lemmy app? Here's a whole list: https://lemmy.world/post/465785
The benefit of having an account on lemmy.world is the amount of content already available on the site. But once you understand how federation works, it doesn’t matter much because you can subscribe to communities on other instances using the same account.
I’m on lemmy.world partly because it’s run a team of experienced admins, so uptime has been great (once we’re past this reddit influx).
"But once you understand how federation works, it doesn’t matter much because you can subscribe to communities on other instances using the same account."
I'm obviously still figuring this out, but this doesn't appear to be completely true, depending on the community. I subscribed to a community on another instance and the content isn't the same when I visit it from this instance.
I made a post on that thread https://lemmy.world/comment/690842
Yeah beehaw.org is the big exception to that statement. They're probably the strictest instance out there, and the result is that beehaw content does not sync properly.
Good to know that is a possibility. Thanks for explaining.