That makes sense, the most prominent instance and upstream project dropping off probably shook a lot of confidence at a time when a lot of people were looking for a reliable Reddit substitute. I wonder where they mostly went, between Lemmy and back to Reddit. Personally, I went from kbin.social to fedia.io, but clearly I'm not representative.
I hope piefed (and mbin) too get more popular. Piefed has implemented feeds, and is going to get an API that is similar to lemmy, so we can use most lemmy apps/clients :DD
Do we have a sense of what that dropoff from 2/11 to 2/12 is? At first I was thinking it might be that hexbear outage, but if I understand it right the MAU stat is robust against that. I was guessing it was some kind of data-processing artifact.