Fediverse

I promise that's not it.

Nobody "forgot" anything. They were just too lazy and too unwilling to accept even marginally less polished or content-rich experiences. I think we all severely under estimated how much the average internet user has changed from a decade ago. The entrenchment is real and it goes far deeper than we realized. The days of userbase jumping from site to site might seriously be over. At least in the way it was back when Digg jumped to Reddit.

And that's really, really sad because that effectively means the boardrooms and shitty admins that run these sites can do anything they like and never face seriously pushback. As long as the content is there, the money will flow. Those of us that give a damn about useability, customization, moderation policies, user control, etc. they have literally no incentive to ever listen to us when they can reliably keep getting income from every teenager that only understands how to hit "Install" from the app store and literally nothing else.

The active daily user count is probably going up because Lemmy is a bit more settled now than it was 6 months ago. There's far less drama, the "main" communities are a little more decided, the 3rd party apps are all in place and more polished, and it's all a bit less janky now, with a bit more content to boot.

We're growing. Slowly. Very slowly. There will be no great exodus, there will be slow trickle.