Probably the most important question to ask of the Steemit blockchain is - how many active users are there?
You read on various posts competing figures... 15,000... 25,000... 250,000... but data are these estimates based on?
This post attempts to come to a measurable definition of active users on Steemit before developing reports to monitor it.
Current Reports
Probably the best reporting on the number of active users is done by 
Learning from Facebook
Image source: pixabay.com
Facebook's 2 billion user milestone was widely reported in the press a couple of weeks ago:
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/
To get to this number, facebook measure active users or MAU's (Monthly Active Users) in the last 30 days, similar to the Archange report.
A Change in Reporting
Back in 2015 Facebook were forced to change the definition an 'active user' due to the use of 3rd party applications to post to facebook. Instead of counting these 'third party pings' from the likes of social media schedulers, they only counted logins directly from the facebook website or app.
Application to Steemit
As we cannot access the steemit login data, we will have to estimate the number of users from comment and upvote activity. There are some decisions on how to interpret the data:
- Should we include voting from steemvoter, steemian etc? These users could just leave their account on 'autoplay' without logging in themselves.
- Should we include posts via steemit apps like eSteem? Facebook's 2015 decision was to exclude these types of posts, but most would consider it to include them as active users.
- Should we include upvotes/posts via scripts like python etc? As these are more than likely bots?
After considering these question it remains to be seen how much information we can obtain from the available data as to the origin of posts and upvotes.