Number of (active) Lemmy users seems to stabilize and I think this is a great thing. Indeed we got a lot of users when reddit shutdown its API (I was among them despite being a long time oss user), many have left, but the community seems now to stabilize to ~ ½ of the big grow in june '23. I think this is very nice for lemmy, we can be proud of this project.
The stats come from: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Coming back to this topic after some time. What do you think about the private group criticism of FEP-1b12? Is this resolvable without leaving the standard set by FEP-1b12? My first instinct is yes, but I imagine you've given this a lot more thought than I have.
Private groups are definitely possible, in fact we are planning to implement them in Lemmy soon. I already made a pull request for local only communities which is a first step in this direction.