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
The turning point will be when companies/websites start spinning up their own Lemmy instances as their official one to replace their forums, which I think will happen.
I don’t know if this is going to happen, and to be honest I hope it doesn’t. Lemmy is not designed to be a forum and shouldn’t try to be used as a replacement for one.
Lemmy is a link aggregator. Yes it can serve a lot of (if not all) the functions of a forum but it’s not designed to be a drop-in replacement for something like Discuss or phpBB. It’s different enough that I feel like calling it a forum is not the right term.