Yeah, my first account on Lemmy was actually on Beehive, but I was confused by their sign up process (there wasn't a page update telling me I had to verify my email, it just happened in the background and didn't appear to do anything when I clicked sign up). I sorted it out when I checked my email an hour later, but that killed the vibe for me. So then I made this account, but jerboa didn't support Aussie zone at the time so I made a shitjustworks account and used that for a while until I started becoming more active in the Aussie zone communities and tried to jump ship just for the ease

But yeah, I saw quite a few people who were very confused about the whole instances thing and a few others that have jumped ship a few times because of it. And as I mainly browse local top day, then all top day once that runs out of content, and my instance federates with all the instances I want to interact with, I don't see a reason to use either of those other accounts I created

As far as I have heard, "activeness" is measured by whether a user posted a comment/post the past month, so lurkers/voters are not being counted. This does likely skew the numbers quite a bit.

EDIT: Found this nice answer from ~5 months ago. Yup, it appears to only count post+comment and leaves out voters and lurkers. :(

I was on this really great cyberpunk / LGBT instance called DATATERM.digital. It was even advertised on the joinlemmy page. However it disappeared without a trace and there is no word on it ever coming back :( I haven't found another one where I felt at home.