In recent days, the discussion around Lemmy has become a bit...spicy. There's a few points of impact here. To list some examples: Beehaw being frustrated enough to ponder leaving the software Sublinks being started out of uncertainty with the lemmy roadmap Drama about inability to delete images and lemmy dev reactions to the priority request [...]
You sound like you actually want to end up with another niche alternative that never does get big.
Is your perfect-world idea for Lemmy just a modestly-sized userbase? Is it already bigger than you’d prefer?
Not true, at this point it seems inevitable that Lemmy will get even bigger. And that’s a good thing in my opinion. But that doesn’t mean it can encompass all different use cases. It’s normal that there will be forks and alternatives, just look at all the different microblogging projects on the Fediverse.