I agree, based on these statistics. Prior to the obvious jump in bot-farmed accounts, there were about 162000 active users with an active user proportion of about 0.186 (somewhere around >29000 active users).
Now there are 649k lemmy users and an active user proportion of 0.055 (~35600 according to the dashboard). If we assume those 35600 users represent the pre-bot-farming ratio of 0.186, we get 35600/0.186 or about just over 191000.
That's still an increase of probably 30k true users, unless the proportion of lurkers have also suddenly drastically increased. I don't think that's true, because, pre-bot-farming, when the user base started growing with the Reddit debacle, the proportion of active users increased accordingly. I assume that's because new users are excited to help grow the community.
Still, in the past two days alone active users went up by over 5k (15%). Maybe that'll continue exponentially, and there'll be 95k (500k total non-bot) users two weeks from now, or maybe it'll continue linearly and there'll be 70k (~385k) users.
I don't know why I spent so long thinking about this.
I would bet the newer users form reddit are not quite as active as the older users, so it's probably a little bit better than that, but in the ballpark.
So actually, it looks like the active users percentage went up starting the beginning of June, precipitously dropping when the bot farming began. That's where I get the pre-bot-farming number of 0.186 from.
It could be that user participation dropped at the same time as the bot farming, but it seems to me that all the new users have been posting a lot (myself included).