It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping.
Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren’t attracted enough to become regular visitors.
Curious to see at which number we’ll stabilize.
Next peak will probably happen after either major features release (e.g. exhaustive mod tools allowing reluctant communities to move from Reddit) or the next Reddit fuck up (e.g. removing old.reddit)
Stats on each server: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
I think the default activity sort is part of the problem. Sorting by activity means everyone is just looking at and engaging with the same topics for 24 hours or so. There needs to be some “hot” category or something so that new stuff gets churned through a bit more regularly. New is too new, top is even more stale, activity causes things with high activity to stay high. It makes for very samey content.
In my experience, Active and Hot have been opposite extremes of freshness. Active shows posts that are more than a day old, and Hot shows posts that have no comments and are just a couple of minutes old.
Not to say it’s all bad. Your post was just a couple of scrolls down on my feed.
Have they finally fixed this to not show old posts out of nowhere in the “Hot” feed? I’ve been avoiding this sorting because of that and hadn’t read anything about it being corrected… yet.
I don’t remember if it was fixed in 18.3 or 18.4, but it has been for a while.
Worth giving it a try, even if your instance is still 18.3
