or will it stagnate and fade into obscurity like many other similar discussion boards?

well it wouldn’t really play out like that, if Lemmy gets overtaken by a replacement (like Mbin, Piefed, or Sublinks), it would be a transition not a death

a big thing we can look forwards to right now is if Pixelfed gets better support to interact with Lemmy/etc communities/groups then we can get a big boost in userbase, even if they aren’t using the Lemmy software we’ll still be seeing their posts and comments

I wish Mastodon would improve their compatibility with Lemmy too, but they don’t seem interested