I've been one of the people saying "we don't need more users. we need quality over quantity" and i was wrong.
the way it's going, lemmy needs active users who post content sothat the network stays relevant. networks like the fediverse benefit from network effects and that means that if we have more users, that improves the value and quality of the fediverse overall.
So please, everyone, when you can, make advertisement for the fediverse in your personal area. Go talk to friends, make attractive stickers and put them everywhere, stuff like that. We would all benefit from it.
edit: source for the graph
...then how does this fix anything? Same federation, same downward trend of losing users?
You're right, on piefed, the loss of users looks prettier.
The data in the OP doesn't include Piefed instances, it only measures Lemmy.
But no, it doesn't solve it - I was just suggesting to try out Piefed for people expressing frustration with Lemmys design limitations.