People make throwaways all the time for services like this. I expect lemmy to be no different.

Monthly active users would be a better statistic to track imo. That gives you a real idea as to how big the community is.

Anecdotally, content wise does seem better than a few months ago. Unfortunately lots of it seems to be highly polarizing and hateful stuff when you look at all communities. Othering seems to be as strong as ever, if not stronger. Probably because hate groups can just setup their own instances or take over parts of existing ones without much blowback like they would get on other sites.