You are applying the thinking of wholly owned platforms and how to judge their success. They have to grab a sizable and hopefully growing number of users who keep coming back to be successful. Because they need the data from their users and/or their eyeballs on ads for commercial success. None of that applies to the fediverse really. It can grow as slowly as it wants to or not grow at all. As long as there is a small percentage of people who spend time and money to keep the instances going. This laced corsage of economical necessities is much tighter for a centrally hosted platform which will have a thirsty boardroom to answer to. Popularity isn’t so much the factor why reddit is/was more of a success, it is/was the quality of information others got from it and it definitely used to be the ease of getting to it. People who got pissed off at reddit will slowly add to our numbers here (or another iteration of a service like Lemmy) as the idea of becoming your own algorithm becomes more normal for the non-techy minded users as well. We’re playing a long game that we don’t even want to win.