Pretty sure there have been a few spam bot/latent bot purges over the last month on multiple instances. I remember people discussing them a little while back. And it was a ton of bots.
So part of what you’re seeing is normalization, as the user numbers were always artificially inflated with bots.
This is exactly it. I glance at All on Lemmy for maybe 2% of my time here, primarily to see if I can discover a new community that I didn’t previously know about to add to my collection.
But it’s true. The real Lemmy experience is in your subscribed communities.