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
Unfortunately it's not even close, yet.
According to these two links
Piefed had 7,415 users with some sort of activity for the month
Lemmy had 1,261,530 users with some sort of activity for the month
Obviously these stats are of questionable reliability given the nature of decentralized platforms, and it's hard to say how much of this activity is "real" or otherwise "content originating from Lemmy", but at the moment it's not a contest.
Luckily, Piefed can continue being used to see Lemmy content for as long as they have funding so it doesn't matter much in the short term how much smaller Piefed's userbase is. We just collectively have to make sure we buy the devs and instances some coffee to keep the lights on.
that. is. wild.
i had no idea we were so small.