The active users present today are the overall users retained to date. There are a few users that are new that graph doesn't show, but not thousands. Even if 10k new users weren't shown on that chart, it would only temporarily raise our overall retention rate to ~2% - until 99% of them left. It does show that otherwise we have somewhere south of 10k content creators presently creating on Steem, which is less than 1% of total accounts created. Many other factors may affect that number, but I reckon it's pretty close to reality.

Of the 1m+ accounts that have been created on Steem, only a bit less than 10k are making posts today, or about 1% of them. No matter how you slice it, that's bad.