https://the-federation.info/platform/73 says for lemmy we have: 1,073,211 Users
It also says that: Last month users: 38897
Which is 2 orders of magnitude of a difference. If you look at the list of instances there ones like https://the-federation.info/node/details/48405 which have 50k users and 10 active last month users.
That means almost all of the 1 milion users are fake users.
I’m seeing people celebrating every 100k users every couple of hours without realizing this.
But why should we know this?
Just so we don’t go out to the world and proclaim a million users while in reality it’s 2 magnitudes less. It just makes us look like we don’t check our sources.