This has to be bait

Active userbase is quite stable, even if slightly decreasing: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

36k monthly active users, that's still something.

For the most active communities, you can have a look here: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active

0.19 is coming, will probably help with people who want instance blocking on a personal basis.

lots of people still using it, unsure what you mean.

Fediverse stuff is always gonna be somewhat niche. Consider that a lot of people still don't fully understand it. Federation is like email in a lot of ways, with multiple domains that can cross communicate, but the way people understood email was by likening it to the postal service and not even considering domains and such. So even explaining ActivityPub by means of email is a bit of a heavy lift.

And getting people to host their own instances? That's asking a lot out of anyone. I had to learn a lot to spin up my kbin instance here, and I'd like to think myself fairly adept at technology.

Add onto this that Lemmy is pretty stable but occasionally still has its issues, and kbin is still in a fairly early state, so it's not as clean an experience as existing centralized solutions.

However, the fact that we have a pretty steady population out here is super encouraging. People didn't migrate during the reddit evacuation and then immediately dip out - there's reasons to stay. Hopefully we can continue to slowly socialize the fediverse to folks and get more people onboard. I know everyone associates Web3 with the blockchain and monkey jpgs, but in my mind this is the proper Web3 - decentralizing the internet and socializing it back into the hands of the people.