Is lemmy growth coming to a halt?
Lemmy world was growing at a decent pace leading up to July 1st, then had a big influx following the API deadline. However the last week in particular has seen a decline.
Engagement still appears to be the same, although a little lower than the start of the month. A few of the other instances i have been checking follow a similar pattern.
Do you think we will continue growing at a steady pace, or do we need another big trigger to get users to migrate? For Mastodon, it seems there's a big trigger every other week to drive users away from Twitter, but with Reddit, the revolt seems to have quietened down considerably.
It does feel a little dead here. Right now it’s mostly memes, meta discussions, or Reddit hate. And the crowd is a very specific type of hyper aware internet dweller (myself included).
Reddit isn’t worth using without third party apps, and it’s the only social media I used before Lemmy, so I’m spending a lot more time off my phone nowadays. I only check the daily top on Lemmy once a day instead of compulsively every time I touch my phone. Guess that’s a good thing.
This is also partly to blame on the sorting algorithm. There is an active PR to improve this https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3378 (Relevant issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3622)
For context, Reddit used to (5 years ago?) show multiple posts from the same community on /r/all, then they implemented a unique function that made it so only one post per sub was shown in the top X. This greatly improved /r/all. It was controversial and well documented.
It was weird at first but it really helped engagement and medium sized communities. I think if that PR makes it it would greatly improve Lemmy too.
I blocked the major meme subs (coms?) and my experience here has been much, much better. Free yourself of last year's memes and explore all the interesting links getting posted
Yes, those meme communities are very active and drown other posts from other communities. Unsubscribing them drastically improve my experience. I can sort by New now and see Posts from communities I subscribed to. And unlike Reddit, new posts got pretty good engagements here, perhaps because other people browse by New too.
"very active" meaning nonstop reposts of last year's top reddit memes by bots or humans acting like bots
I don't want Lemmy to be reddit 2.0
It's fine, memes also have their audience. I also blocked all of the communities, but to each their own
It's what filters are for. Don't complain - configure.
...did you skip my first comment?
I don't care what your argument is.
Ok so yeah you did skip it. I said I filtered those communities but thanks for the "advice"
Now please kindly take that high horse elsewhere, it's stinking up the thread
It would be nice if you could block a community directly from the front page without having to navigate to it first. Whole instances would also be useful.
I can do it on Connect - click the dots in the upper right and you can pick Block Community
I wish there was an Undo button, though. Right below Block Community is Block Instance and I've clicked that a few times by mistake
That's a very good thing.
And to be honest, as selfish as this will sound, I wouldn't want Lemmy to grow too much - unless the eternal september crowd can be contained.
I disagree. While I do like that the discussions and top level comments are not nearly as homogenized as Reddit eventually became, I’m really missing the niche communities. I wasn’t subscribed to any large subs on Reddit, so my feed was basically just a curated list of discussions for my hobbies. No memes, news, pop culture, internet drama, or politics. Right now, that’s just not possible on Lemmy due to the low population.
Give it time. Lemmy is still very fresh, but I'm confident smaller niche communities will keep popping up and it will eventually add up. Region and country locales seems to be doing well.
Yeah, the lack of many of my favorite niche communities makes me constantly wonder if I should just "suck it up" and go back to Reddit. I miss so many of them. If I wanna discuss a particular TV show or video game, often I just don't have much of an option here, cause the community specific to that TV show or game is very likely dead.
We also don't yet have many interesting text post subs that I liked to read on Reddit, like AITA, Best of Legal Advice, Best of Redditor Updates, Hobby Drama, etc.
Similarly, my local city sub is pretty dead (and never shows up on the front page cause the sorting algorithms suck). So I barely have any local interaction anymore! I met real life people on Reddit and it was great for getting advice from others who live in my city.
I’ve had the same thought, but sucking it up would mean using the official Reddit app or old Reddit on my phone/tablet (at least until they kill that, too), which are both just too annoying of an experience to be worth it to me. It’s not a principle thing, it’s a usability thing.
For the time being, I’ve just accepted that it’s gone and I’ll miss it for a good while. I’ve been browsing some old school forums for my random hobbies (Gear Page, Hard Forum, Steam, Fresh Loaf etc.), but otherwise, I’ve found other things to occupy my down time until either Lemmy’s smaller communities take off or something else fills the anonymous-niche-hobby-social-media void. Got me some cool books and Picross on Switch.
Give it time
Understood. That's why I said:
I think I get your point but from a larger perspective, Lemmy (amongst several others) is just a means to an end:
Free the internet of corporate control.
A steep goal but a worthy one if you ask me.
So I say make it grow as big as possible even if that means it is not as intimate as it is right now.
In a large federated place, there will be infinite amounts of smaller/niche hosts to migrate to.
The idea imo is that we need to focus on our goal here: stop the infinite brainwashing happening through mobile devices.
Feel free to disagree. Its just how I see it. Have a good one.
I don't disagree. You have a point. If I don't like a community, I can just move elsewhere.
Exactly. What I feel we might be suffering from is the status quo. We‘re so used to being in walled gardens that we assume homogeneity. But this will not be the case if there are thousands of instances. You then might have an instance that is manga themed or retro themed and so on with themed versions of the other places etc. sounds like fun to me.
But the bottom line is that we need critical mass for this since that ensures visibility.
The sorting algorithm fixes can't come soon enough IMO. Small subs are dead because they simply can't show up on the front page with most of the sorting algorithms that Lemmy has. That limits how much you'll see in your feed and also makes Reddit a better product (due to all the niche subs it has that actually show up on the front page).
Once 3rd party lemmy apps get up to snuff it'll be easier to switch. The .ml loss probably hurt us and for now a lot of redditors would rather complain than leave.
I think it is very much a client thing.
The one I use - memmy - frequently has issues with widgets that stop responding, and currently is glitching such that the upvote/downvote buttons are superimposed over the posts. Search results show all communities as having 3k subscribers even if there’s actually only single digits. If you highlight text to make a link, it overwrites the text with the empty link rather than making the text into a link. Mlem and Liftoff - the other two I checked - have their own issues.
I think we can also do a better job hiding the complexity of federations from novice users and cut down on the impact of bot-based crossposting by detecting that the lines articles are identical. I could see, for instance, discussions being merged on the client side.
I found reddit neither usable nor interesting before Alien Blue, and I suspect there are a number of potential users out there who would onboard or increase engagement here with a better UX.
I think it's as you say. Lemmy's growth is going to happen in waves, until it has reached a critical mass that sustains its own "weight", in terms of growth.
You have to remember that this is no commercial platform, with little advertisement, which is made by its own users. Growth is bound to be slow, at first.
Not only that, we want it to be slow. Being a server admin at the moment is racing from fire to fire. The Lemmy software needs to mature a bit before it will be ready for the less-technical users.
As a user I disagree. But I do understand your side
As someone running their own instance - its still VERY rough.
I'm sorry you're getting downvoted, it's perfectly reasonable to want more content and it seems reasonable that more users would bring that content.
However, a massive number of new users (rather than slower organic growth) probably won't bring what you want. Because there are massive issues that many people will not put up with.
As an example, Lemmy.world recently had an administrator account broken into because of a problem in the code that meant accounts could be compromised (any account) by viewing a page. Lemmy has never had a professional security review (they are super expensive).
Another example, if a user tries to delete their account (or if an admin tries to ban and remove all the content of a spam bot), the site will freeze for all users, it will start showing them an error page until the operation has completed or (more likely) the operation is killed by server admin or automated stabilty software. The bug report has a lot of commentary on the cause but doesn't seem to have clear direction on how to fix it.
And yet another, Hot and Active sorting are still messed up for old posts recently federated, which means you get months or years old posts showing near the top even if they have no comments. This is luckily fixed in the upcoming release, but is an example of things that may turn away new users.
There are still massive performance issues. Currently the large sites are throwing money at the problem, using powerful hardware to attempt to mitigate this. But Lemmy has something like 100,000 active users across the whole network. If this was 1,000,000 you'd hope there was more content, but what you'd probably get is a site that won't load.
We have to remember that 2 months ago, there were about 1000 monthly active users. This is already a massive growth in a short time, and many volunteers are working hard to try to improve Lemmy and increase performance to be able to scale to more users. But 2 months is a short timeframe for new contributors to learn how the code works, work out ways to improve it, write that code, test it, and release it with confidence that it's stable. In reality not all these steps happen and new bugs are introduced (such as the account takeover one) so we really don't want to rush into more users.
With that said, we also want to be seen as an alternative to reddit. So when new rushes happen, we want to be ready for the influx and be able to handle the new users, we shouldn't turn people away.
According to the Fediverse Observer, Posts and Comments are still growing day-by-day. It's definitely slower growth, but as long as it stays healthy and active it will continue to have growth spurts as the enshittification of the rest of the web continues.
And the best thing at can do is post and comment to let people know we're active and alive!
Yeah that’s a good idea. Maybe I should stop lurking so hard.
Slow day to day growth is the kind you want to foster and plan on anyway. Cant rely on spikes and waves, but they are of course apriciated. The more content we make the more people will come over, for now it's really that simple from a user standpoint.
The exodus from reddit has stabilized and we've made this place our experimental home. That wave is over. We won't get another wave until some of the kinks are smoothed out. If we have fewer shutdowns and better apps then I bet we'll get steady growth. Also it might take a while for people to realize that lemmy is easier to use than mastodon, which gave federation a bad name for most normies.
Yep, I've migrated but my time spent browsing Lemmy vs Reddit has tanked. Less than 10% of my previous time. This is due to still waiting for a Sync for Lemmy release and lemmy.world having issues with session. I've been unable to log in consistently since the hack.
I'm on the sync for Lemmy private beta right now. You are in for a treat! 🤌 Google should approve the preload page any day now (ball is in their court). And then after that we're looking at maybe a week until public beta.
What’s the rush? Rome wasn’t built in a day. If people are happy (enough) with it now it will grow with time and at the pace it should.
If things get too big too quickly then the cake will always collapse.
I like the amount of content here right now and things will diversify gradually over time.
Most people seem to forget their Reddit accounts were more than 8,9,10+ years old and a lot changed over that period.
Actually I like having a "smaller" space. Reddit was already way too big, with an anonymous giant blob of users. I wouldn't even have bothered writing an answer like I do now, since it would have been buried under 100s of other posts and comments within seconds. Sometimes smaller and slower are positive features, at least to me.
The only issue with the smaller space is the niche instances. One of the things I loved about reddit was finding communities for hobbies and interests. With something small you are sometimes lucky to have 20 people in an instance and then even less posting or engaging with content.
There is a sweet spot for platform size.
Too small? Only a few communities and you can’t find your hobbies.
Too big? The place is overrun by normies who treat the platform like Facebook (posting unironic old people memes) or Instagram (running scams and OnlyFans ads). It also might become too difficult to moderate or the admins could get greedy and their own and advertisers’ profits before user experience (enshittification). All of these are happening to Reddit BTW.
However, we are too far from the “too large” problems and Lemmy instances’ size is generally kept in check by popular recommendations (join-lemmy.org, awesome-lemmy-instances) favoring <1k communities. So I think pointing average Reddit users to Lemmy is more helpful than hurtful, and I designed and helped build this banner at r/place despite having otherwise left Reddit.
Can confirm, am sitting at around users for c/daria.
Yup, I can be late for hours to comment on a post and can still get replies. If you’re late by an hour on a popular sub on reddit, you might as well not comment at all.
Honestly, I want half of the people on reddit... to just STAY on reddit.
There is a lot of toxicity that I don't want here....
It already is... :(
It could be far worse. But, its not that bad yet.
Yea, I don't want to sound like I'm arguing here, but there is a generally negative vibe that is being replicated here on lemmy as it was on reddit:
The toxicity is already here when you browse "All." I've just blocked most of the offending communities for a better experience. The list grows longer every day... but that's just my opinion. I think we can all agree that browsing "All" is like playing mental health on nightmare mode.
Perhaps that is why our experiences differ- I only look at my subscribed communities.
Which- in my case, ALL would yield around the same results as I run a pretty small server over here.
Although, after testing, that does not appear to be the case.
ALL:
Subscribed:
Not- a drastic difference- but, a noticeable one.
I Imagine this difference is especially noticeable on the larger servers though.
Sorry, I stand corrected. Found myself into a thread where apparently half of lemmy thinks that vandalizing others peoples property is ok... because they drive an SUV.
Yep, I got downvoted for suggesting that vandalizing the car was not a good plan..
Edit: I think you're actually talking about a different thread. Lemmy needs therapy.
It absolutely is... And I'm starting to burn out of this place more everyday.
That's fine. Just do our things here, and when Reddit eventually shoot their own foot again, the next wave of refugees will have an alternative ready, unlike us a few months ago where there was confusion over where to migrate.
Kind of lucky the Fediverse version of Reddit worked out as the main alternative while Mastodon and Bluesky duked it out and then Threads came out of nowhere.
Also IMO the Lemmy apps are better than Mastodon... I admit I was one of the people who got too confused to get on Mastodon but I figured out Lemmy just fine.
The popular Mastodon instances seem to be more stable than the Lemmy ones though. I don’t think I’ve experienced any extended downtime on the Mastodon instances I’ve been on yet. Also, because of the race between the tons of lemmy apps being developed, they tend to have more bugs (on beta). I use Tusker beta for Mastodon and it’s been very stable compared to the Memmy and Mlem betas.
I'm pretty sure most of the people who will come here as a result of Reddit are already here. All the new Reddit refugees are probably getting over the hype with Lemmy/Kbin and are finally not pouring so much time into the platforms. And as a result, slowing growth numbers and tapering engagement. Its pretty natural and nothing to be worried about. There's still plenty of engagement here (just look at what happened to Threads a couple weeks after it came out).
Regardless, we should focus on making Lemmy/Kbin a fully fleshed out platform and draw in users the natural way rather than relying on Reddit falling off for new users. At this point in time, the Reddit blackout is pretty much over.
Might as well throw in my rant here, as I'm against this sentiment of not wanting Lemmy/Kbin to grow more and possibly even get mainstream. I get keeping out the undesirables of Reddit and other social media to prevent an Eternal September situation, but I also want more people of different backgrounds and interests rather than the same Reddit critic/tech enthusiast type of crowd. The great thing about federation is that if you want a smaller and more tight knit/topic centered community, there are smaller servers to join (not so much for Lemmy/Kbin at the moment since they are new, but it should get better over time). We can't seriously want Lemmy/Kbin to develop well if we voice desires to keep people out and rebuild echo chambers. Lots of smaller communities and topics have little activity because there's really only one group of people here right now.
I think we're going to be seeing new waves of Reddit users on a fairly regular basis. Steve Huffman likes to roll these things out slowly in drips and drops, and it is very unlikely that this move alone will make reddit significantly more profitable to run. If he wants to do an IPO soon then he's going to need to make some more choices that really annoy the users (banning porn seems like an obvious one, even though he's said something like he's fighting to keep porn on reddit). They're going to keep cracking down in dumb and obvious ways on things and redditors will abandon ship just as soon as something they care about gets in some way messed with.
Don't forget that redditors have left reddit in large chunks dozens of times in the past.
Don’t know don’t care. There’s a community here now and it’s healthy.
This feels like a clickbait news article headline. Any headline with a leading question can usually be answered "no".
As a side note, Ian betteridge, who has the law named after him for the phenomenon you reference, is quite active on the fediverse
Lemmy, we, are not a corporation. In fact, exponential growth is BAD since the instance admins have to spend more money and work to keep it running. There is no financial benefit to chase the numbers. Let it grow organically.
It will always be like that. If 100 people come here for the first time on one day its great if 10 end up staying till the end of the week and lurking and out of those 10 maybe 1 would end up staying for longer. Thats just how these things work.
Fortunately, this effect is stronger with Facebook’s Threads even though they likely paid celebrities to join. I think the anti-Zuck sentiment is going strong and Lemmy does not have major controversies around it. Also, if users pass the somewhat high barrier to join, they might be more likely to want to use the account once it’s been set up.
Anyone who would've left Reddit has already done so, they may be a small increase when Boost/sync becomes available but I doubt we'll see much growth. No one has ever heard of Lemmy.
Nah, spez isn’t done with his halfwit ideas. Wait till they kill old.reddit
Don’t forget they are planning on going public and spez says they need profits. Profits generally come at the expense of pissing people off.
Wait and see.
Depending on his share of the company (which may change after going public), he might be forced to resign. However, I don’t think that would reverse the process as he apparently surrounded himself with like-minded people (similarly, Neal Mohan continued Susan Wojcicki’s work as well)and the movement towards profitability at all costs and enshtiitfication is natural course of action for the company following its bottom line.
And certainly now that I've fully left Reddit, I'm no longer spreading the word of Lemmy there
People will go where the content is.. all it will take is one massive event where Lemmy is the source
Don’t imagine for a second that Reddit is done pissing off its users. All it takes for lemmy to win is keep improving reliability and usability.
Kinda don't want Lemmy to be mainstream.
I agree wholeheartedly. Every time a online service becomes mainstream the capitalist enter the field and turn the service to shit. It happened to MySpace, it happened to Facebook, tumblr, Netflix and so many others. Now with the upcoming IPO of Reddit, the service needs to be ready for the milking
Yes, no, kinda.
(I am basing all this on these stats: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats)
First, the most detailed statistics show "Active Users Monthly". That means, if you have any interaction (e.g. posting a comment) you will be counted as active for a whole month.
If you have a look when the decline first started, you'll see that it's right around one month after the Reddit blackout.
So what happened is that tons of people came to Lemmy during the blackout, tried it out for a few minutes, maybe posted a comment, and then dropped it again. They were still counted in the statistics until the 12th of July, which is when the drop starts in the statistics, because all these "single-day-users" are dropping out.
But: the drop from the highest point to now is only ~10% of the users. Other than that the user count seems to be kinda stable.
For more up-to-date numbers look at the post/comment counts, since they are daily. Here you see a linear, maybe slightly more than that, increase, which indicates a steady amount of interaction.
Btw, the number of total users is steadily decreasing, and that's a good thing. The reason for that is that there are lots of obscure instances with a handful of active users but 10k-90k of users who have never posted anything. These instances usually have open registration without captcha, so all these users are probably bots.
Since these instances don't actually have real users or content, they probably were just created by someone to try something out, so they keep getting closed, and with them, the bot accounts disappear.
I see two big events in the coming weeks
Reddit said during the 3rd party app backlash that old.reddit is not going anywhere...
...so it’s dead in 6 months?
^(They^ ^reassured^ ^the^ ^Apollo^ ^dev^ ^of^ ^cooperation^ ^in^ ^2023-01)^
I thought 3rd party access has already gone, with the exception of a few apps like narwhal.
Is old.reddit officially being killed ?
Technically, you can still create a dev app in your profile and get a free API key “for debug purposes”, and ReVanced-like patches for Android clients such as Infinity allow inserting such keys. However, there is no NSFW access and I imagine this loophole is getting closed soon.
Web scraping from old.reddit is another option used by clients such as Stealth. It is slower but maintains anonymity and NSFW access.
Reddit said during the 3rd party app backlash that old.reddit is not going anywhere...
...so it’s dead in 6 months?
(They reassured the Apollo dev of cooperation in 2023-01 so I’m extrapolating their credibility)
I think there are 2 groups coming from reddit. 1- Users wanting a more niche community (think early reddit) 2- Users trying to turn Lemmy into present day Reddit. Theres a good amount of communities that are carbon copies of reddit subs. Personally I think that reddit has morphed into something toxic (Ive had a reddit account for 15 years). While its good to have growth, nobody wants to use a site that is so popular that Aunt Betty is chiming in with her love jesus memes.
I think the growth is going fine. Just invite friends to Lemmy and share an app with them.
Old.lemmy and liftoff app is what got me to finally stay. I think more people would join if they knew about the site update and that there are a bunch of apps for it now. Originally it seemed to be just one app and it was terrible.
I wouldn't call it a matter of need. While I want to see Lemmy grow, I don't think that we should rely on outrage on another platform to drive our own activity in the long term. While the number of users joining has slowed down, it certainly hasn't halted.
All we can do is make Lemmy as solid and enticing of a platform as possible, and leave those on Reddit to choose between supporting a platform they don't like and leaving. We shouldn't be responsible for forcing their hand, but we should be responsible for maintaining a healthy community here.
I think even something like a indie video game developer hosting a forum on Lemmy instead of Reddit would do wonders for making Lemmy "mainstream". Or even a youtuber, streamer, or some other content creator at that. But of course, it's not something I'd go out of my way to do; just something that I think will happen in due time.
I think that ease of use is the biggest hurdle at the moment. While yeah Mastodon has grown it's also improved quite a bit. The onboarding is much more streamlined versus six months ago.
Those barriers are getting better but are still there for Lemmy. Apps are starting to come which is fantastic but the users need to want to engage with the platform. Streamlined sign up, improved features and UI improvements will need to continue to evolve in order to grow the user base.
One thing Lemmy is missing is a way to join that doesn't require you to understand the fediverse - currently the barrier of entry is quite high. Also, there aren't any great user interfaces yet, which makes the platform difficult to use.
I agree about the user interface, but the rest I'm not too sure about. If you recommend new people just join lemmy.world then they really won't need to know very much about the Fediverse. The front page will work as expected, the Hot sorting algorithm will work okay and their instance will already be connected to most communities due to its size. However, you're furthering centralisation then, which is the dilemma.
Knowledge of the Fediverse and tolerance of clunky operations are mostly needed if you join a smaller instance. Learning to find smaller communities by searching for
!community@adress.tld(which doesn't work in all apps and sometimes needs to be done more than once) for example is not a good experience for newcomers, particularly those not tech-savvy. And sorting by Hot does not work well on a small instance.Ideally the onboarding process could integrate lemmyverse.net somehow and give new users a suggested list of popular/active communities to start off with, so they can immediately find some places where discussion is happening without drowning in the memes of /All.
Don't bother with the Fediverse. Point them to Lemmyworld, that's all they need to know
Yeah. A good app is Thunder but still lacks key functionality like
editing commentsor proper Markdown rendering.Also, if I see a link to another Lemmy instance’s post, I have no idea how to log in with an account on another Lemmy instance or another Fediverse service. Integrating OAuth-like Sign in with... functionality into ActivityPub would help a lot, especially if you get automatically logged into all instances whitelisted by your instance’s admins. However, that would require either a centralized server (which erodes Fediverse principles), cross-site cookies (which likely don’t exist for obvious tracking reasons) or a browser extension (which is browser-specific and an entry barrier for users, and could introduce security vulnerabilities).
Liftoff works better in those situations, you always have the option to "see this from that instance", it's very good
That‘s been my main issue with Liftoff: This content was retreived via lemmy.world. You are not logged in there. Now I found the option. Thanks!
Now I just need a way to remove lemmy.world from the app (edit: you can by long-pressing it in the Accounts menu) and rid my All feed of duplicates fetched via different instances; then it will be the perfect app.
Happy to help, enjoy your browsing!
Not sure if you've used it for a bit, but Thunder allows you to edit comments now
Edit: edited from Thunder
Oh! I did not realize that the swipe action changes contextually because it has the same color. Thanks!
I'm not naturally a poster I got tired of posting. I keep thinking of stuff to post while I'm at work then forget when I get home.
If it doesn't, I'm okay with that. The level of engagement I have here is very satisfactory to me. Reddit could be way too overwhelming. That Lemmy is small is kind of refreshing.
If you build it they will come
Except for the overwhelming majority of situations where somebody builds something and nobody comes.
At least it's not filled with bots
This is true!
They sure won't come if we don't build anything though.
Also true!
I think we might follow mastodon's path, with a users spike with each reddit fuckup and then a plateau. But only time will tell.
Many communities are getting larger though, I wonder why despite this ?
It will come in waves as Reddit would become worse and worse over monetization.
I think that growth is not going to happen passively. These comercial platforms are deliberately pushed and advertised and there is always some new content whenever you open the app.
Fediverse, lemmy whatever may have the better model in theory but that is not enough to create buzz or to reach a critical mass of users.
"Hello here is the better model now come here, why aren't you here? " is not guaranteed to work.
anecdotally; the lack of content and relatively steep learning fediverse learning curve compared to reddit both make it easy enough to understand why lemmy & the fediverse haven't reached into the millions of users yet.
i'm a reddit refugee and i've handcuffed my ability to participate in reddit because i'm still angry about the api changes. i also work in technical, but i still struggle to understand all of lemmy's (and the fediverse's) quirks. both result me me still spending more time on reddit as an unregistered lurker than with lemmy as a member who can participate.
also we can see how it turns out the ones who migrate to lemmy is really a tiny minority, majority of people still using reddit like usual and most people dont want to use 2 website to just browse stuff they can already do in reddit
that makes sense to me because reddit has all of the content that lemmy has plus a LOT more.
i suspect that i will have to rejoin reddit so that i don't miss (my) world shaking events like the recent red hat shift that lemmy completely ignored.
I think the triggers are likely to die down as the CEOs gradually stop sawing at their own genitalia.
What you have here is a start, but the barriers like having to find all the niches through searching mechanics that send you to a website and back to a client are always going to be a sticking point. There's not much support on any client to just get a list of communities on the instance, much less a different one.
If they come down or the instances centralize enough that it doesn't matter we'll see some growth by enticing other users because it'll be functionally the same thing to them. But there are some definite hurdles in getting here, and there's no incentive to advertise (read $) other than grassroots.
Seeing as how the servers keep on doing down or there are other similar problems, I'm not sure Lemmy could handle the traffic even if it did stay. And there are far too many subs with next to zero traffic which only makes the whole site look kind of sad. You are better off having 1/2 as many subs with 2x the engagement that they currently have.