At this point, it’s become a bit meme on Reddit to share the creepy or disgusting DMs you receive. However, nothing like that has happened to me here yet, even though I’ve been active for the equivalent of three or four of those pervy chat invitations on Reddit. I’m no less active here.
That’s “monthly active users”. Though a bit different from how reddit counts their MAU as Lemmy can’t report on logged out users (since that info isn’t collected or shared between instances) and doesn’t report on users logged in but not interacting (you must vote, comment, or post within the last month to count).
The fediverse is growing but slowly, and is nowhere near the peak of 3 years ago. But no one expected it to stay.
If you check the Lemmy history you’ll find it very slowly losing users, but piefed is gaining users faster than Lemmy is losing them.
Unfortunately fediverse.observer shut down recently so it’s hard to find the past stats these days.