Edit: I find it strange that this image is implying that as soon as you stop implementing features you start dying. This is how you get needless bloat and turning solid software into something its original design never intended. A lot of software companies fall prey to this plan of endless expansion which eventually turns off the primary userbase of their software.
Lemmy doesn't need infinite features to continue surviving, but we definitely aren't there yet.
I think the big challenge right now is sustaining growth. I don't think many reddit refugees are paying for their fediverse services.
I support dessalines on Patreon, but I don't really know what else I should be doing. I think that folks who want to run these services need to figure out how to charge money for it, or they won't be able to buy infrastructure or network bandwidth.
It's starting to feel like it's more in the death spiral already because no one wanted to implement features that would enable growth. The reddit api apocalypse was a great chance to step into a more expanding or mature step, and it seems to have stalled.
you missed the step where after development slows down, there are hundreds of forks of the project created making it too fragmented to be stable, again resulting in death.