We should not forget that these people scrunched up their faces at Twitter itself for years and said ”but what is it?” Only in the fullness of time did it permeate our entire society.

This is a very good point that should be pointed out more often. I think the longevity of the ecosystem matters more than the active user count today. Eventually through pure erosion lemmy and other decentralized platforms could wind up winning in popularity as well if things get worse everywhere else and they’re stable enough to continue adding new users.