I feel like I’ve been seeing more posts and comments though, and looking at those, they seem to still be rising (although probably influenced by bots).
I wonder if the spike of active user may be caused by people first trying it out (then giving up), followed up by people making several accounts on different instances before settling for one or two.
Everything I tried was annoying to use and didn’t do what I wanted for some reason, so I just made my own. This took some time, but not as much as I expected.