Every tech platform started out with these types of users.

The big corpos that succeed however realise that these initial users are usually the ones who are often also the first to get pissed off and leave - they aren’t here because people are there, they’re there for other reasons. So they start a campaign using those people as the bait, for the more regular users that are more likely to go where the party and people is - “hey look, were popping off here, come join us”

Once the initial userbase is in the minority, they have a rock solid userbase and are unlikely to die due to users fleeing - they’ve built a resistance to an exodus the likes of Digg, so they can now do riskier and riskier things without fear of losing their people.

As for if fedi follows this pattern, it might but it would probably take longer as there’s no company to push that campaign. It can really only grow through word of mouth and whatever reporting the media decide to drum up.

In the fediverse, those types of advertising campaigns are up to the individual instance owners, and honestly, should probably be avoided due to the fact that a rapid increase beyond donational support is likely to kill the instance or turn it corpo - I especially not recommend this for the larger “main” instances, like lemmy.world, as they don’t need a larger % of users compared to the rest of the verse than they already do.