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
I chose mander.xyz and feddit.nl partially because neither require an email address. I haven't really kept track of who all they have and have not defederated from. I think both don't defederate much. I use the block feature in Connect liberally to remove the communities I don't care to see, like the tankies.