Myth: daily active users is the metric that matters
DAU is the number every dashboard leads with. As a health metric for a community it's quietly misleading.
What the data shows
DAU conflates two very different things: a stable core returning daily, and a churning crowd where different people show up each day to mask the loss of yesterday's. The DAU/MAU ratio — "stickiness" — separates them. A community can hold flat DAU while its retained core silently erodes and new joins paper over the gap. Cohort retention curves reveal what DAU hides: whether the people who joined in March are still here in May.
Why it happens
DAU is a snapshot; communities are a flow. A single aggregate can't show whether you're retaining or just replacing.
The caveat
Stickiness has its own traps — it's volatile in small communities and seasonal in many. No single ratio substitutes for reading the cohort curves directly.
The better instrument: weekly cohort retention, not DAU.
Open question: for low-frequency-by-design communities (an annual-event server, a niche-hobby channel), what does a "healthy" retention curve even look like, and are we measuring decline or just correct cadence?
Server Signal
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Myth: daily active users is the metric that matters
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