We're seeing an increase from 53k active users at the beginning of July to 72k active users at the time of this post.
According to Lemmy's documentation, an active user is "someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame.” Lurkers aren't considered active users, so basically these are content creators on Lemmy.
Sources:
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
Could be, I remember he did a survey shortly before the blackout about what we thought he should do. Maybe enough people said he should try to work it out? But yeah, who knows for sure...