Hey, @abenike.

I'm not sure if someone has replied to you off of STEEM about the changes here since you've been gone, but I thought I'd go ahead and leave a comment here and update you as best I can.

In reality, participation has been down over the year, mainly due to the lower STEEM prices. After hitting all-time highs, they've been under $1 for most of the summer and into the fall. That has caused plenty of people to shorten or forego their time here.

However, there are more or less 40,000-plus users a day now, and many of those are daily users of the site. Those who have found communities to be a part of and people they enjoy interacting with seem to be the ones who are still participating.

At the end of September, we had our first hard fork since I started here back in January. Hard Fork 20 changed quite a few things, the biggest being doing away with bandwidth and changing it to a resource credit system, where individual actions like upvotes, posts, comments, following, etc., have a cost. RCs are tied to SP, so the more SP you have, the more you can do without running out of RCs. Right now, those below 250 SP or so are now limited in what they can do relative to what they could do before. This has also been affecting participation, especially among newer/smaller accounts.

We have yet to see the flood gates open for new accounts, but that was another change in HF 20. It currently costs quite a bit in resource credits (RCs) to claim an account, so Steemit Inc and a few of the dapps have been doing it more than individuals.

There were issues getting the HF implemented which locked out most people from being able to participate for 24 hours. Since that time, the smaller accounts have had the most problems.

SMTs are supposed to be coming the end of March. Ned has announced he will be creating a new company and heading both it and Steemit. The new company will work on a new interface to STEEM while Steemit Inc developers will continues to work on the blockchain.

That's pretty much it with the important things, I think. Hopefully you find them useful.