On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 4:05 PM Maxwell G maxwell@gtmx.me wrote:
What evidence shows that the group is ever shrinking? I often see Self Introduction posts and new people interacting with project. I suppose that whether they continue interacting afterwards is another question.
I'm glad you asked. Earlier this week I decided to avoid doing other work by putting together some quick charts of devel list participation. Here's the number of unique participants per month from 2004–2022: https://bcotton.fedorapeople.org/images/devel-participation-monthly.png
And for a less-noisy version, the median of the monthly numbers per year: https://bcotton.fedorapeople.org/images/devel-participation-mean.png
There are a lot of questions left unanswered by this quick analysis, but there's a clear trend in fewer participants over time. In fact, last month had the second smallest participant count (tied with October 2022). Of course, these charts don't show _why_, but they do support the assertion that folks are dropping out of the conversation faster than others are joining.