Excerpt:
Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.
grow sounded nice until you said mainstream.
The beauty of a federated social network, is that even if it becomes mainstream as a whole, there will always be smaller niche instances for us to get away from the big ones on.