memes

Definitely it will but I don't expect it to happen soon. Social media has turned fairly toxic, and now that people have been saturated with those bad experiences, many people have simply moved on. Some to offline, some to far more obscure rather than centralized spaces, some even are dead of COVID, or lost or are stressed about keeping their jobs in Big Tech, etc. A new generation will rise up to replace them and those likely will use a federated source, or they may turn away from "social media" altogether and use more like wiki writing or even micro-blogging.

What people choose to not understand is that while they are free to do whatever they wish, so too are other people - e.g. a community mod removing their post, an instance admin banning them altogether, or even simply someone else leaving the room when all the kids shout and make too much noise.

Lemmy requires heavy and constant curation, and a thick skin during that never-ending process, to be usable. Not everyone is willing to do that, especially people who are perfectly happy to entertain themselves in other pursuits. Thus the most capable people are the least likely to put up with our crap.

Hopefully I'm wrong, or at least just wrong enough that that aspect of the Fediverse still grows despite that counter trend.

Lastly, there is hope for improvements on the technology side - e.g. if you could see someone who is consistently downvoting you even for solid quality stuff, that's someone you can block to reduce that negative "noise" feedback, except right now the voting is essentially anonymous since there is no way off a non-instance admin to view it (outside of K/Mbin, I mean like even on those platforms iirc I've tested and you can only view those originating from another K/Mbin instance, at the time, again iirc). When things become more equitable in that regard, it should entice more people to remain.