I use the “new” sort priority to try to find active participants

New is going to show you the posts with the least engagement... Seriously, that's literally the worst way to go about what you're looking for

Because it's post that literally just got made. This isn't reddit where 10,000 people are online at once and things take off quickly. Browse by "active" and you'll see the posts people are engaging on.

I engage whenever I think of something to say. If I post it anywhere, I post it on Lemmy.

I have also noticed a drop in engagement these past couple of weeks. I think there are many reasons why this is happening, just a few of which include:

1. Way too many memes and meme-centric communities; I've had to block so many communities the past few weeks just to declutter the All feed and to find posts that warranted actual discussion; it starts to feel like 4chan after a while
2. Too many communities and not enough users; there was an attempt to mirror reddit during the exodus, and there just isn't enough of a userbase to justify so many communities; many of these shell communities are aggregating dozens of off-lemmy links everyday without a user base to engage with, so it just spams the All feed and makes it look like a ghost town
3. Many users have likely gone back to reddit or found alternative platforms

My own engagement has slowed, as I just don't even know if users from other instances are seeing my comments or posts. Lemmy's federation system broke shortly after the explosive growth and as far as I can tell it hasn't been fixed. Subscriber counts vary greatly, depending on which instance you view a community from. Some folks see your post, and some don't. That's a nonstarter for a lot of users who might otherwise engage.

Yes. It feels like it has slowed down significantly. I'm posting, but there's little engagement.

I browse by new to help start the conversation (one comment is enough to get people to click it), but it’s not a good way to find it actively happening.

If you sort by top of the last 1 or 6 hours you’ll probably have better results. Those are still pretty new but much more active conversation wise.

I dunno how to hotlink, but if you scroll to the active users graph at https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy you can see there's been like a 25% dropoff in active users since the peak in July. Lemmy has still grown 50x since May, and it's much MUCH more active than it was then. But we've definitely crested a peak and not everyone who gave Lemmy a shot then is sticking around in a monthly basis.

This isn't necessarily bad. Lemmy is still young and has many rough edges, it wasn't realistic to win all the users that tried it on ease-of-use in a head to head with reddit. And Mastodon has had multiple growth waves interspersed with periods of declining usage, but with the spikes has grown ie remained stable overall. Early-stage commercial social media have big ups and downs in engagement and growth as well, and just like lemmy those ups and downs are often externally driven... when competitors mess up, when a big global news story hits, when a major sporting event happens... these can all be catalysts for one-time growth. It's not a straight line.

Time will tell what user level we stabilize at in the short-term and what events spur new growth, but it's normal to have a big expansion be followed by some degree of contraction.