Since my last post yesterday, lemmy.world has added over 3000 new users, bringing the total user count to 22000 today (source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list). It firmly holds the position of the second-largest lemmy instance, passing beehaw.org by a large margin of 10000 users.
In other news, beehaw has defederated from lemmy.world a few hours ago. How does the third-largest instance only have 4 ~~mods~~ admins for its 12000 users?!
So much going on!
If you claim that there are 22k accounts, but only 6k of them are active users, then there would be 22k - 6k = 16k abandoned accounts.
Then one of those two figures is wrong. If the oldest account is 2 weeks old, there should be 22k active users per month instead of 6k. So, I don't know.
The active user count is the count of all unique users from an instance that made a comment or a post within the last month. So that means we have 6k people posting and commenting and 16k lurkers.