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
But just because !books@lemmy.world hypothetically exists doesn’t mean !books@programming.dev or !books@ttrpg.network have similar enough content. You can already view these communities from any instance. You’re essentially trying to apply something like federation on top of something already being federated. They can all have very different rules and different content.
If people have to hunt each post storage location individually, then it will be as if they don’t exist to 99.99% users. What will happen is there will be one big one, and they most likely be all on the big instance, and federation becomes just a weird thing that does nothing because functionally that will be just like Reddit. Centralized servers, centralized servers under the control of a tiny priesthood.
Not at all. Reddit has communities that are similar but with different names, rules, and culture and different people use them because they want different experiences. The same is true here.