Ultimately I think it's sort of like Python and C#. Python got big by being easy to use, with great community management, and it took decades to reach its peak of popularity. C# got big because Microsoft threw a ton of money at people to use it. Of the two, Python's popularity seems to be lasting longer.

I suspect this will be the case for all the new sites and protocols popping up in The Web 2.0 Crash, or whatever the history books call it. We'll see a few sites like TikTok and Threads that "buy their friends", get a ton of overnight popularity and then fade away, and we'll get a few "institutions" that take their time building healthy communities over tens of years. ActivityPub didn't wow me with Mastodon but I'm pleasantly surprised by Lemmy, so maybe the Fediverse will be one of those institutions... but personally I still think there's room in the market for RSS to make a comeback.

Digg died.

What I think lemmy needs 1 it needs to feel like a website to the user 2 single login you join and automatically get put on a server that isn't overloaded 3 search you need to be able to search for any sub you want right on the app 4 this is something that a user wont see but is important for them a unified system of raising money for instances

One thing I've also seen people mention that could help is weighting the hot and active algorithms to prioritize smaller communities on the home feed. I remember that Reddit's algorithm did that and it made it significantly easier to see content from communities that weren't just the largest memes and news communities.