The active user count is bullshit in my opinion. We know most users are just reading and not posting or commenting. Those users are invisible in these stats.

An active user should be anyone who logged into Lemmy in the last 30 days.

This also means that small instances with a low amount of "active" users could have a lot of users actually using it in silence.

Active should mean "using Lemmy", not posting.

Active is only creating a post or comment. Voting doesn't count. Simply because of how Lemmy counts, which will be different to how bigger sites count their own users.

But also Lemmy really took off over the past 2 months. So if people signed up, posted once, then never came back, they will still be listed as an active user because of how little time has passed.