Two and a half years after filing an issue, I finally sat down over the last several evenings and attempted to fix it.
I’m neither a data scientist nor a Flathub expert, so I would treat this as a proposal/starting point. I *have* spent a lot of time thinking about this over the past three years or so, and can try to help explain the really weird problem space to anyone who wants to help.
The headline, I suppose, is that Flathub has peaked so far at an estimated 4.3 million monthly active users. Buuuut take that with huge caveats, mostly of the “this is an imperfect but conservative guesstimate” variety. At least now there is a way to reproduce that guesstimate, and iteratively improve on it, hopefully.
I do think we’re pretty massively undercounting at times, and the data is pretty volatile based on factors other than “number of people downloading updates.” But it’s a start!