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’ve been reading a lot of your exchanges on the Lemmy GitHub and I can tell you with a high degree of confidence that you are not the subject of a hazing ritual. What’s going on is a miscommunication issue; there’s no ill will directed towards you.
The Lemmy devs are under a great deal of stress these days due to the recent influx of activity, both on the big Lemmy instances as well as the Lemmy GitHub. You’ve clearly gone to great lengths to investigate various SQL bottlenecks in Lemmy, and this work does not go unnoticed or unappreciated.
The problem you’re likely running into is that the Lemmy devs are trying to address a wide array of issues, whereas you are zoomed in on some very specific performance problems. Whether or not the core devs are wrong when they say your findings are irrelevant is beside the point. What they are really saying is that they do not have the attention bandwidth to try to see what you are seeing right now.
If you find yourself unable to work with the Lemmy project, there are other fedi projects in Rust like Mitra or Kitsune which might be more receptive to your contributions. I’m personally very interested in seeing rudimentary Lemmy (Groups et.al.) compatibility in Kitsune.