Has it grown like people have kept predicting? or is this peak lemmy? Did Peak Lemmy already happen?
It's definitely slowed down, but that's fine, let it grow naturally. Personally I sometimes get put off because I end up seeing the same posts repeated across different instances so it can be harder to find content, but I also love the smaller community.
What is the current state of Lemmy?
After reddit flood, Florida. Maybe Virginia.
It's stable and largely fun, especially more active but niche communities.
Lemmy has been stable on users since the Reddit Exodus, which is probably good because I don't see Lemmy in its current form able to handle growth.
Onboarding new users is a hassle unless those users know someone already on Lemmy to act as a guide. This is just going to push more people to default instances.
I think that the developers need to shift to a more distributed method of developing an open source project, including stakeholder input on what to develop next.
People complain about moderation, but I feel like a decent problem had been in distributing ownership of instances across several people and developing policy from that.
If Lemmy were to grow, it would likely grow as a fork.