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.