That was going to happen one way or another. Not everyone from the subreddit made it over to the discord and not everyone from the discord is making it over here because they've discovered they like the discord. A painful issue but one nonetheless.

Calm down. It is a marathon not a sprint. People haven't been "driven away", the data objectively shows otherwise. There's a very very slow user churn occurring which is typical of all communities from videogame audiences to random internet spaces. We're only just about equalling that churn, maybe falling slightly below it, but either way the site is health and doing fine.

The devs and everyone is working flat out on a host of things, the primary of all being to just keep the thing working in the face of many technical problems. More dev time can not just simply be magicked up for all the different issues, give it time.

Just because people haven't made the site part of their daily routine immediately doesn't mean they should be considered permanently lost users anyway. They'll be back. You can absolutely count on people wanting to see the takes here as key election things unfold, while the dem convention was ongoing the whole site had an uptick of engagement that dwarfed engagement immediately before and after it.

In my opinion retention isn't the primary problem of the site, growth is. While retention is indeed important there's not enough effort being put forth into spreading the site right now. There are tonnes and tonnes of people over on reddit that don't know it exists yet. Additionally to that we're not performing outreach to influencers right now which probably has the largest potential to generate big new-user waves using the same methods /r/iama uses to trade advertising to reddit's audience for influencers bringing in their audience to reddit for interviews. Every person that does an iama brings their audience with them, this was a core component of reddit's growth strategy and I've already vocalised the need for the site to follow suit, I don't have the personal time to run it alone or even as a primary person on it however. There's also a whole bunch of other things that have been discussed and thrown around from what I've gathered but the primary barrier is time.