Just say 40,000. Which is a pathetic number, but perfectly fine for the type of niche communities budding up here and there across all the domains connected together here.
If you care about American politics and being outraged at every and any thing thrown at you during the day, it is active enough. However you are SOL if are curious about any other topic that does not involve narcissistically talking about yourself.
Assuming you are invested enough to find or create a community for a topic you care about, be prepared to be talking to yourself for a long time and consider yourself lucky if you manage to get 2 other people commenting on it.
Congratulations. You are bringing your dozen communities that only survive due to your incessant work, which kind of exemplifies my point: Lemmy has maybe a handful of communities outside of the politics/meta-fediverse topics.
I don't, because if that happens either others will have done a more thorough job (because it's something they care about - I have my own obsessive areas that I'm the one doing that stuff for), or if they haven't then I have much bigger problems to deal with (e.g. war in Europe).
I mean, you should always check your backups and make 2 for good measure, but supposedly some of these newer ones are made for archival and claim between 10-100 years. Never trust such claims without verification but if true could be the best thing for archival besides punching bits in stone.
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