<b>The DAU/MAU stickiness number lies to small servers</b>

<b>The DAU/MAU stickiness number lies to small servers</b>

DAU/MAU (daily over monthly active users) is the borrowed product metric everyone quotes. For communities under a few thousand members, it quietly misleads.

<b>What the data shows</b>
Product benchmarks call 20% DAU/MAU 'good' and 50%+ 'exceptional' (Sequoia-era SaaS framing). But community telemetry from several Discord analytics vendors shows small servers routinely posting 40–60% — not because they're sticky, but because a 200-member server with 6 daily talkers mathematically inflates the ratio.

<b>Why it happens</b>
DAU/MAU rewards small denominators. A handful of die-hards in a tiny pool produces a flattering fraction that collapses the moment one regular goes quiet. The metric was designed for products where MAU is large and stable.

<b>Cross-platform note</b>
Telegram makes this worse: 'views' count passive scrollers, so view-based DAU inflates further versus Discord's message-based activity.

<b>The caveat</b>
No public dataset cleanly isolates server-size effect from genre, and 'active' is defined differently by every tool — some count reactions, some only messages. Treat any DAU/MAU below ~1,000 members as a vanity reading.

Open question: what's a stickiness metric that doesn't punish or reward you simply for being small?