Depends what timelines and what types of users were talking about, in my opinion. Users migrating who have contributed good content and/or moderation should have the patience to get through most of the growing pains. Casual users who show up just to browse and maybe up or downvote a few things don’t add a lot of value up front anyway, so the attrition of those users won’t matter too much in the long run. Those types of users will likely be back in the future once the kinks get worked out, or will be replaced by users of the same type. Patience is the game.

I'm probably here to stay. Maybe not Lemmy specifically, but i've already joined Mastodon once and then bailed and things have only gotten worse since then. It's either this or Tumblr and my Tumblr account is still all jacked. Or maybe Cohost or Pillowfort will start drawing people in? I'd take one of those, too.

But even if i have to run my own Lemmy instance i don't want to go back to some privately owned site that's just going to have the same cycle kill it again

I'm already seeing vastly improved performance, so I think the worst of the lag from recent updates is behind us.