It feels like it's dying. Just anecdotally it seems like there have been less threads lately, less quality threads, and less discussion overall. More anecdotally I feel like the last couple of federation / defederation slap fights ended with many users leaving as well. I can think of a few who left because we were federating, some who left because we then subsequently defederated from lots of the fediverse, and then even a few who said they would leave if we didn't defederate and then left anyway when we did.
I feel like mostly overall I have seen very few new posters, and have seen less and less of some certain power posters.
Is this just a illusion or is this really what's happening. What is to be done?
Unironically it's just the post sorting algorithm. It was way better before federation, although I can't put my finger on why exactly. (Not to criticize our admins and tech people who work on that stuff behind the scenes, I've also seen a ton of improvements and stuff too).
One of the original hexbear devs made a custom algo sort that was really good but the versions change to allow federation broke that, we've been trying to get it back but no luck at the moment.