Can bot cleaning explain this?

This is an expected statistical artifact given the "last month" aggregation and a huge influx of new users of which many don't stick around. I am saying they don't stick around, because that's generally just what happens with a lot of new users (e.g. they checked it out, decided it's not for them) and also due to the federated nature they might have switched accounts and similar things. Then the bit about "last month" aggregation: Have a look at the "Active 6 months" graph - it's still trending upwards. Those are likely a trailing average aggregations, so a maximum is reached when that 1-month-window starts (roughly) at the beginning of the huge user influx. For the 6-month window that hasn't happened yet, so still going upwards. Assuming nothing changes (similar amount of new/leaving active users) the graphs gonna be interesting in the next few weeks: After the initial wave of influx the balance was most likely negative (more users from "the wave" dropping out again than added users afterwards), however I'd hope it's gotten positive since then. If that's the case the graph should start trending upwards 1 month after the balance became positive. It's unclear when that was the case, but some towards end of July might be a reasonable guess? The same graph with a smaller window could shed some light on that (or just expose useless noise ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ).

Another sign I'd consider good: The active user ratio is trending upwards.

Disclaimer: I don't know how the data is aggregated, nor how exactly "active" is defined - the gist of the above very likely applies though. I was too lazy to look it up in the code - if someone knew how these graphs are aggregated and were so kind to let me know, that'd be appreciated :)

As a new user, I kind of can’t get over the idea that bots just seem to scrape links and repost them here.

That seems to be most of the contributions to communities to me.

I will admit, I was hard into Lemmy at first, but then gradually slipped back into the Reddit habit. This is my first visit to the site in a few weeks.

Growth is not always consistent.

The novelty has worn off. Contributions are going to fall to the baseline for this platform. Question is, is the Lemmy space going to expand from that point?

Once Boost for Lemmy releases, 10, 000% growth will occur over the coming weeks afterward 😉 (IYKYK)

That decline is slower than I expected. It shows that more people stay than not

This is normal. We've gotten a big enough surge where we have consistent content now. Lemmy was a bit rough when the migration started, but hopefully improvements will go a lot faster now. We're definitely missing a lot of core features and polish still. But Lemmy is a long term social network that is grass roots. All we need to worry about is creating a sustainable community now, and polish up the experience to newcomers so we can sustain the next exodus and be more of a viable platform.

It needs a solid app like Apollo was for Reddit to help it keep active users.

People always tend to bounce back to the bigger platform.

How I like to deal with this is to use two or more platforms of the same kind.

Occasionally open Reddit, and occasionally Lemmy. Occasionally checking Fedi, and occasionally going on Twitter.

It may be disorienting at first, but it's better to get used to going on many websites than sticking to just two.

Being new to Mastodon and Lemmy I personally struggle to figure things out. Just finding a brief summary on how Lemmy works in contrast to reddit has, so far, yielded no helpful results. While I think for me this is just a matter of sticking with the services I can imagine that a lot of people would check in, struggle and check out again.

The, let's call it infrastructure, of Lemmy and the way registration works due to the fediverse is quite different to what most people are used to.

It's because Reddit is still alive and well and Lemmy just doesn't offer enough to be a serious alternative (yet)